Charles Herring 25 April 2026
On my bench in Christchurch Botanic Gardens

A few weeks ago I wrote about being Lost in Space, Time and Standards (the strange way New Zealand keeps reorienting me at street corners, in dates on a page, in the way a Tuesday morning here is somebody else's Monday afternoon). The counterpoint to that disorientation has been something I genuinely did not expect: a better balance between work and life than I ever managed in the United States. The pressures are still real. Business is accelerating, AI-enabled work has its own new tempo, and the time-zone and day-of-the-week mismatch with the US has me feeling spread thin most weeks. I wake at 3 or 4 in the morning to work the US load and then roll straight into the NZ day, and by 11am I am usually zapped.

What has been sustaining and nourishing me are my daily walks through Christchurch. The fifty-minute video below is a tour of the places and the small rituals that make up those walks. It is a love letter to my new home, an open invitation to the friends and family who keep telling me they want to visit, and a small encouragement to anyone else trying to take care of themselves in an increasingly turbulent world. Find the version of this that works for you, wherever you are. The world is loud right now. The walking helps.

Last Words

The city does most of the work. I just have to keep showing up and putting one foot in front of the other.

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About the Author

Charles Herring

Charles Herring

Co-founder & Chairman, WitFoo

I started WitFoo in 2016 to make information and operations shareable across the craft of cybersecurity — between companies, law enforcement, national security and insurers, who mostly cannot see what each other sees. Before that I was at Lancope and Cisco, and I began in 2002 as Network Security Officer for the Naval Postgraduate School.

I lead research and development on a platform that ingests trillions of messages a day across hundreds of clusters. It is sold as Conductor, Reporter and Analytics, licensed flat per appliance with unlimited data — because a team charged by the gigabyte ends up making coverage decisions on a spreadsheet, months before the incident that needed the logs they dropped.

Everything here is mine, not the company's, and it wanders. Corrections are genuinely welcome — I would rather be right than consistent.

A note on how this was written: I use artificial intelligence tools to help me research, check facts, and edit these posts. The ideas, the arguments, and any mistakes are mine. I read the sources, I check the claims, and I take full responsibility for what I publish here. The views are my own and the writing is my intellectual property.