When traveling, there's a substantially bigger demand for objects to be highly contextual. Everything needs to come from someplace, or made especially for the traveler, or have this special story behind them.
My understanding of this concept has a lot to do with art. There's something to marvel about the combination of colors and letters that perfectly describes a moment, however subtle. Like the moment I met Poroma Kanya, an APLP delegate from Bangladesh. At the time she was talking about her sketches, which she does as a hobby. Her drawings were detailed, rich in colours, and reminded me of paisley. There was a particularly striking one, which she said was made during a boring meeting.
Several months later, a not-so-subtle moment occurred when Poroma fell and broke her foot while doing preliminary work for GIST in New York. She had to fly home immediately for surgery, and at time of this writing, still recovering. She's doing well, thankfully, and honestly we miss her in GIST.
Let's switch subjects for a minute. Ever been in one of those workshops or seminars in hotels? What do you take away from them? One would say "the content, of course", but I hardly see this happening. Oftentimes participants would write on those notepads with the hotel's logo on them, scribbling away with their complimentary pencil. But at the end of the day, almost everyone leave behind their notepads, later to be collected by the hotel staff to be thrown away and replaced. No takeaway. No memories.
I usually collect these used notepads. It's fun to see what people wrote down - some about key lessons, some cryptic arrays of symbols (phone numbers, wifi password, etc), and some of them do have doodles, though I've never seen anything as good as Poroma's boring meeting sketch. Anyway, most of the notepads have plenty of blank pages remaining, and I just didn't want them to go to waste. So I would compile a stack of blank or used paper, bind them together, put a nice cover on it, and call it my DIY notebook.
So one day I was asking Poroma how she was doing. It's fine, but boring to be at home a lot. How's GIST doing?, she wanted to know. Good, good. Would you draw me something? Sure. OK. Could you draw me an emotional roller coaster?
She didn't even blink at the request. A week later I had this.