"Opposites don't cancel — they co-exist."
– David Studden
David Studden was at his desk in Abu Dhabi when he wrote most of these answers. His office sits near the airport flight path. Planes rise through his window at intervals, ascending quietly over a city that had, in recent weeks, been living under the sound of drone alerts and missile warnings.
He watched one lift off. And kept writing.
That image — the man bound to his chair and screen, watching something else cut through the sky — is a useful entry point. Because David has spent more than twenty-five years inside the aviation industry, moving through roles in strategic planning, business development, marketing, and human capital training with leading airlines and airports across India and the Middle East.
He now works in Global Sales & Partnerships with Etihad Aviation Training, connecting with aviation professionals from across the world. And still, after all those years near aircraft, the sight of a plane in ascent makes him stop.
The passion, he'll tell you, is undiminished.
There are people who work in an industry long enough that they stop seeing it. David is not one of them. He talks about birds and planes with the same language — grace, freedom, the wonder of something rising with apparent effortlessness. He dreams, only slightly metaphorically, of being one.
Suspended in Time and Space
Ask David where in-between moments tend to stay with him, and he doesn't hesitate: takeoff and landing.
Takeoff because a journey has begun — to somewhere new, to family, to home. Landing because it's a return to the real world from what he calls "the cocoon of the plane." But it's the hours between that interest him most.
When David boards a flight, he makes a deliberate choice: no wifi. Not because he can't connect — but because he won't. It's a form of protection. The digital noise of the world below fades. Pressing problems lose their urgency when there's nothing to be done about them. What could feel like powerlessness becomes something else entirely: a rare, clean space where time loses its normal shape.
"You sometimes go back in time, sometimes go way ahead," he says. "Time loses meaning — all that matters is the transition from here to there."
He values these unreachable hours in a way that most frequent fliers have forgotten to. The constant availability of in-flight wifi has made transit feel like just another place to be reachable. David quietly rejects that premise. His flight time is his own.
Three Objects
When it comes to what he carries, David is precise.
The first is his phone. He's direct about it: yes, he's addicted. It connects him to work, to people, to the network he's spent a career building. He doesn't dress this up. He states it as fact.
The second is a small, compact sling bag — passports, money, credit cards, headphones. It travels with him so naturally that he sometimes forgets it's there. If he could travel with only this, he would. It contains everything necessary and nothing else.
The third is his rosary. Small, wooden, smooth from use. He carries it in his pocket, not as a display — as a tether. The warmth of the beads, he says, offers reassurance, hope, strength, and energy in a way that nothing digital can replicate.
Three objects: one a marvel of human engineering, one a simple piece of fabric, one a reminder of something older and quieter than either. Together, they constitute everything he needs when the world is moving fast.
The Queen of the Skies
He thought hard before answering the question about design.
His instinct was honest: most of us interact with well-designed objects so constantly that we stop registering them. Design becomes invisible — which is, in a sense, the point. But the object he came back to wasn't invisible at all.
Was it the Airbus A380, like the ones in the picture and like the one from which the picture had been taken from? No, it was the Boeing 747.
He talks about the 747 with the attention that people reserve for things they genuinely revere. The silhouette. The balance of the wings. The unmistakable upper deck. Four engines and a nose that commands space before it even moves. It is, in his words, "a masterclass in design that blends engineering, function, and beauty so effortlessly."
There's something in that phrasing that says a great deal about how David sees the world. Good design is not clever. It is not a trick. It is a meeting point — the place where what something needs to do and what something needs to be arrive at the same elegant answer. The 747 does this. It always has. And its silhouette, decades after its introduction, is still immediately legible from half a mile away.
The Things We Leave Behind
The transition that shaped David most was the first one.
More than twenty-six years ago, he left Hyderabad — the city of his birth, with its sounds, smells, chaos, and color — and traveled to work in a city in the desert. Different culture. Different food. A first summer of real heat. Colleagues who seemed strange because he seemed equally strange to them. A disorientation that, over time, became familiarity, which became belonging.
He has lived in Abu Dhabi for fifteen years now. When conflict arrived in a city he had believed insulated from it, his response surprised him: this is home. Not a compromise, not a settlement. Home.
But when he reflects on what actually shaped him, it wasn't the big moves. It was the small transitions in between — the day-to-day shifts, the quiet changes from one task to the next, one conversation to another. The moments that don't announce themselves as significant while they're happening.
He returns, on this question, to a line from Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air: "Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationship we create between each other and the world, and it is still never complete." It's a reminder he keeps close, particularly when he feels the weight of distance — from home, from family, from certainty.
He is writing a book. He calls it a "start, stop, maybe project," which is perhaps the most honest description of most books that exist. The working title is The Things We Leave Behind. He is clear about why: writing, for him, takes you places much like a plane does. And this particular project may be the thing of him that remains after he leaves.
Next Stop: Madison
His next destination is Madison, Wisconsin.
His youngest son is graduating. His eldest son will be there. For a man who has lived as an expatriate for most of his adult life — with a permanent rotation of suitcases at home as a quiet reminder of the life he leads — this kind of gathering is not routine. These moments are rare, and he knows it.
He expects to find a young man ready to step into the world. A young man who has, in some ways, been doing exactly that since he left for boarding school at twelve. The arc is familiar: you leave what's known, you find your way, you arrive somewhere that slowly becomes yours.
David has been doing this for over twenty-five years. He recognizes the moment.
On Movement and What Holds
What David describes — the deliberate disconnection at altitude, the three objects that anchor him, the early-morning walks when his legs and thoughts move in unison — is a particular kind of relationship with motion. Not restless. Not nostalgic. Present.
He admits, honestly, that rhythm can be hard to find. That sometimes the world simply won't cooperate. That autopilot is real, and the way he fights it is not through a system but through a gesture: stopping, getting up, walking toward someone he doesn't know, and smiling.
When they smile back, he says, he reconnects with reality.
At SOTIYO, that's what we're building toward — the conditions that make this kind of presence possible. Objects that don't demand your attention. Comfort that travels with you rather than waiting at the destination. The quiet confidence of carrying exactly what you need, and nothing more.
David already knows what that feels like. The rosary in his pocket. The sling bag he forgets he's wearing. The plane lifting off outside his window while he keeps writing.
Connect with David on LinkedIn, read his writing on Substack , or listen to his podcast, Sky Lounge, on Apple Podcasts.
Looking for more conversations from people who move with intention? Browse the full Roam Lines series at sotiyo.co/blogs/roam-lines — each one a different answer to the same quiet question.
If this conversation sparked something, you might also enjoy our piece on expatriate life or the experience of building home in an adopted city with the interview to Sara Ylipoti. Or, if you’d like more conversations like this one delivered quietly to your inbox, you’re welcome to join our community below.
