I worked from a coffee shop in Nashville today. It’s called the Barista Parlor Golden Sound, and it’s a converted recording studio in Music Row, with garage doors and a wide open floor plan.

As I sat down at one of the sparsely populated benches, it didn’t escape me how different working from a coffee shop felt in Nashville vs Bangalore.

I compare the two because I spent a considerable amount of time working from Bangalore during my 4 month work-from-India stint earlier this year, and it looks like I’ll be spending at least a couple of weeks in Nashville.

When I spend more than a few days in a city, I like to take it easy. I like to pretend like I live there, and do “everyday things”; things like laying in bed all day and not leaving my room. You get the vibe.

Something else I like to do is spend part of my work day at a local coffee shop.

After spending all day lounging around “working from bed” yesterday, I decided to find a local coffee shop today. After my morning workout, and my morning meetings, I headed to a coffee shop to grab some brunch and coffee, planning on spending the rest of my work day working from there.

As I looked over the top of my laptop screen, perusing the population, I felt an intense longing for being back on the front terrace at the Third Wave Coffee Roasters in Indranagar, Bangalore; feeling the warmth of the tropics mixed with the busyness of people bustling all around you.

Bangalore is a tech city. The coffee shops are filled with tech people. People pitching their startup ideas to potential investors. People talking to clients in a timezone where it’s past midnight. People busy with life. Bangalore felt alive in a very relatable kind of way. In a way, perhaps even more so than New York ever did.

Wrapping up my workday around 5pm, which is 6pm ET, I took a ganter around the wide open floor space of the coffee shop, looking over all the Barista Parlor merchandise available for purchase. My eyes landed on a package that said “optimizes water for coffee and tea”.

I thought this was hilarious. Seriously? Now we need to optimize the water for our hot beverages? So I took out my phone to click a picture. I zoomed in to make sure the subject was centrally aligned in my 1:1 snap. I gotta optimize the picture for instagram. I know. So meta.

And just like that, my eyes zoned in on the word “Third Wave”. Here in a coffee shop in Nashville, I found my Third Wave.

Life has a way of telling me that what I’m looking for is sometimes right in front of me. If only I zoom in a little.