Why It’s All About Geography
Whenever I meet someone new, I rarely start with the question everyone expects.
I do not ask, “What do you do?”
I ask, “Where are you from?”
Geography, for me, is not small talk. It is orientation. It is how I locate someone in the world before I try to understand who they are within it.
I call this practice the Tao of Geographical Connection, and it has become one of the most reliable ways I know to establish a real, human entry point with another person.
Place tells stories long before résumés do.
The Tao Knows the Shape of Land
Taoism has always understood something modern life tends to forget. We are shaped by terrain as much as intention. Mountains cultivate patience. Rivers teach adaptation. Cities compress time and heighten alertness. Open plains stretch the nervous system and slow the breath.
Lao Tzu never needed a passport to know this. The Tao flows through valleys, not abstractions. Zhuangzi’s wisdom feels rooted, embodied, and earthy because it is. Taoism does not separate human character from environment. It assumes they are in conversation.
So when I ask someone where they are from, I am not asking for coordinates. I am asking about climate, rhythm, pressure, and possibility.
A Journalist’s Map of the Human World
My instinct for geography comes honestly. I spent years as an urban journalist, moving through cities the way others move through ideas. I have lived in or visited 46 of the 50 states, not as a tourist collecting souvenirs but as a listener collecting texture.
That kind of travel changes you. You begin to see patterns. You notice how people from port cities carry a certain openness. How inland towns often hold their stories closer. How border regions understand ambiguity better than certainty.
I carry those maps in my head. They show up naturally in conversation.
Small Places Hold Big Doors
Sometimes connection happens because I know a detail about where someone lives or was raised that surprises them.
Traverse City, Michigan, for example. I know it as the Cherry Capital of the United States. Mention that and something softens. A smile appears. Suddenly we are talking about seasons, harvests, and the smell of summer near water.
Or the Sacramento area, where I resided in the 2000s. The City of Trees. Once named by Harvard University as the most diverse city in the United States. Say that out loud and the conversation deepens. It’s here where diversity becomes a lived experience, not a slogan.
Place invites memory. Memory invites trust.
Stockyards, Jazz, and the Soul of Cities
Other times, geography opens doors because it signals respect.
I have walked the stockyards of Fort Worth, Texas. I understand what that history means to people whose families built lives around cattle, labor, and heat. That matters.
I have spent nights in New Orleans at Snug Harbor, one of the finest jazz clubs in the nation. When I mention it, musicians lean in. Music lovers nod. The city stops being an idea and becomes a lived pulse.
This is not name-dropping. It is place-honoring.
The Tao of Connection in Practice
The Tao of Connection is simple but not shallow.
Start with a place.
Listen for what shaped someone.
Let geography do the soft work of opening the heart.
You do not need to have been everywhere. You just need to be curious enough to ask. To listen. To let the land speak through the people who come from it.
Connection, like the Tao, flows more easily when you stop forcing it.
We Meet in the Middle of the Map
In a world obsessed with branding and positioning, geography remains beautifully honest. You cannot fake where you are from. You can only reveal it.
When two people share a place, even briefly, they meet on common ground. Literally and metaphorically.
That is the Tao of Geographical Connection.
Start with the land.
Let the rest unfold.
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If these daily, bite-sized Daily Chocolate Taoist reflections landing in your inbox have steadied your nervous system, cracked open a new way of seeing, or helped you release what no longer fits, I invite you to support my work with a dirty chai tea with almond milk (or five) to fuel my journaling sessions where these thoughts are born.
Warm cup, quiet mind, dangerous ideas.
Thank you for reading, thank you for thinking differently, and thank you for stepping into 2026 with intention, even if you’ve sworn off goals entirely. Here’s to less forcing, more flow, and a year that unfolds better than anything we could have planned.
Happy 2026
Diamond-Michael Scott, aka The Chocolate Taoist.
Chocolatetaoist@proton.me