I was rushing from Grand Central to Times Square, elbow to elbow with people chasing their dreams. I knew what I was chasing — the next should. And in my gut, it wasn’t right.
Who I am lives in my heart. When I feel stuck, that’s my body telling me I’m standing on the river bank instead of flowing down the river.
I’d already started answering that, without knowing it. Yoga. Aromatherapy. A yoga teacher training, even though I never felt called to teach — I was called to the connection instead: breath, body, ground. Deeper in, I found nature was where I actually went to breathe. Central Park. Upstate New York. Anywhere with trees.
Then the world stopped. I was living in New York City on Friday, March 13, 2020, when COVID shut everything down. I kept working from home, kept trying to process what was happening around me — and one August evening, on the phone with a friend, I mentioned an old dream I hadn’t thought about in years: driving around the country, camping and hiking my way through it. She said, “Missy, maybe it’s not a dream. Maybe the Universe has been trying to tell you something.” That night I said, “I’m doing it. I’m taking this trip.”
Five months of planning later, I hit the road in January 2021. I spent 355 days out there. Drove 48,000 miles. Visited 39 states. National parks, state parks, city parks. Hiked, camped, kayaked, swam, paddle-boarded, made snow angels. Slept through wind storms. Gracefully escaped the frustrated eye of a bison. Got a little too close to a rattlesnake for a photo.
Hiking Lava Lake trail in the Gallatin Mountains, something shifted. I’d spent the first half of my career creating opportunities for people to escape their lives and find moments of joy — 25 years in experiential marketing for professional sports. Standing there, I made a declaration: the second half would be about something different. Helping people find joy in the everyday, without needing to escape anything first. I started paying attention differently after that — looking for meaning in things I might have walked past before.
Not long after that, I was grocery shopping outside of Yosemite National Park when I heard a kid running down the aisle, laughing. Moments later my cheeks were hurting, which by then was rare enough to notice. I brought my hands up to my face and realized: I was smiling. That moment mattered enough that I started a list on my phone — every time I caught myself smiling, I wrote it down. Walking toward Crescent Lake. Paddle-boarding at Lake Elmo. Shopping at Albertsons, of all places. It’s still going.
Here’s what I believe, for what it’s worth:
You won’t feel joy all the time — nobody does — but if you look for it and lean toward it, you’ll find it more often than you’d think. Once you start catching yourself smiling, you’ll start doing more of what gets you there, and the things that don’t will start to fall away on their own. And “should” — that word does a lot of damage. Anytime someone tells me what I should do, I’ve learned to ask myself what I actually want instead.
I’m not smiling all of the time. I’m not joyful all of the time. But I catch myself more often now, and when I notice I haven’t in a while, I know where to go — outside, almost always. My list makes that obvious even when I can’t feel it yet.
None of this happened alone. Therapists, yoga instructors, friends, family, coaches — my journey has been full of people holding space for me. If you need that kind of support, ask for it. I mean that.
This is Catch Yourself Smiling. Not a program, not a fix — company, while you find your way back to what’s actually yours. Start with The Parks Podcast, or come catch yourself smiling with me.