Courtesan Continuing Education

“The respectable women envied her freedom and called it scandal. She called it Tuesday.” – Author Unknown

There’s a version of this life that looks, from the outside, like one long Tuesday. No commute. No boss. No performance review. What the outside doesn’t see is the quiet industry underneath – the reading, the practicing, the becoming.

Years ago I started doing something I called ‘Courtesan Continuing Education’. It wasn’t a curriculum. It wasn’t a plan. It was more like a private agreement with myself that this work didn’t have to be the whole of me. That I could keep learning. Keep accumulating. Keep being interesting – to myself, if no one else.

I started simple. A summer massage course. Then yoga teacher training. Both obvious choices, maybe – the kind of thing people expect from a woman in my position. But there was something real underneath the cliché: the body as instrument. Understanding it from the inside out.

The yoga training led somewhere I didn’t anticipate. I started a small company – a yoga-related product. I had the idea, then the organic formulation, then the packaging and printing decisions, then the whole tangle of marketing. None of it was glamorous. Most of it was sitting at a kitchen table with samples and a general sense of figuring it out as I went.

It didn’t do well. I was traveling, I wasn’t working hard at it, and the business reflected exactly the attention I gave it. But it served its purpose for all parties: for my patron, there was freedom to travel with me almost at will, and I still got to be a person with a project. That arrangement – where everyone gets what they need – is harder to engineer than it sounds. What I kept wasn’t market share. It was the knowledge. Organic formulation. How something moves from concept to physical object. What packaging costs and why. The gap between a good idea and something people actually buy.

Then I took flying lessons in Sugar Land.

I wanted to learn the basics of landing a small plane on manual instruments – steam gauges, as the cool kids say. I got the basics. My prowess has not been further tested, and if you’re ever in a situation where I’m the best available option, I’d pick me last too – but we still have a chance.

That’s the thing about this kind of education. It doesn’t have to be practical. It doesn’t have to scale. It just has to do something to you on the inside.

Right now I’m working on something that’s getting me genuinely excited – building a foundation of knowledge in an area that’s making me feel creative and alive. That feeling matters. I think it makes me more interesting to myself, which makes me more interesting full stop. There’s something about enthusiasm – real enthusiasm, paired with diligence and a working mind – that is flat-out sexy. Not performed interest. The actual thing.

Some of my favorite time with the people I meet through Sydney is hearing their story. What lights them up. What they’re building or learning or chasing. What enthuses you?

I’m asking sincerely.