Embracing Unknown: Moving Across The Globe

You can either view it as “I’m going on an adventure”… or “It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you'll be swept off to”
- Bilbo Baggins, or CS Lewis, or both depending on how you view it…

Here’s a peculiar mix for you.

I’m a naturally indecisive person who decided to move across the world by himself, in part just to see what would happen. There were definitely a few key factors that played into why, how, and where… we might get to those another time, but first: some of the prompts that nudged me out the door to even THINK about a new chapter.

Disclaimer: This is not a here are your 5 steps to life in a new place kinda post. This is more me sharing the provoking questions that nudged me out of the door (and forcing myself to self-reflect).

Have you ever felt like you’ve overstayed your welcome? That you could easily stay put and be fine, but something wasn’t quite “right”? I loved where I lived, the people I had in my life, and a job that was making me learn and grow. But the comfort was coming with pain. The pain was slowly taking away from the joy of the good things. Then I heard someone say (and I’m paraphrasing here), don’t let being in a great place limit you from exploring what’s around the corner.

It’s certainly not a one size fits all, and this is certainly not a grass is greener message, but I’ve found sometimes you have to fight the comfort zone pretty hard to see if it's still healthy for you, and I've found that simply choosing not to ask questions can be as harmful as staying comfortable.

So, first I gave myself permission to explore thoughts of what I might feel is the next chapter. For me, that looked like making a list of places that could be fun to go live for a season. Some were familiar, somewhere I knew people, and some were neither of those things. Ultimately, London was last on the list as the due diligence of risk. Increasingly that became the one that was both the most exciting and most scary to consider. 

The next thing, was I started to ask myself “6 months from now, what’s the decision I’ll be proud to have made?” This question has followed, haunted, provoked, guided, and inspired a lot of my life over the last year. It's a big thing to balance living in the moment and remembering to take care of your future self, which sometimes means making a hard decision or taking an uncomfortable path in order to set yourself up for success. It can be so easy to feel pulled to only decide how to get from dawn to dusk, and back again. And we all have seasons where that is truly what is best to get by. But other times, ya gotta break that seal.

I can't tell you yet if it was the best decision, but I can tell you it was right. It's certainly hard, costly (in many ways beyond the bank account), challenging, and uncomfortable. But it's rewarding, enriching, revealing, opportunistic, and ripe for discovery.

It’s definitely not been a dream walk. Plans fell through, hurdles came up, and arranging a new life from half a world away is clunky. Tears have been shed (both because this season has required a lot, and because I started watching This Is Us for the first time (Oomph).

In full honesty, if I did not have the strongest compass of inner peace that has let me take incremental leaps, we would not be here. Which is a lot coming from a 9 prone to dissociation when in distress, but it’s been another beautiful part of the journey - learning a deeper trust with yourself (body, soul, spirit, and mind).

At the end of the day, I guess part of reality is a choice is only truly that in the midst of options. And it’s from the midst of options that a choice becomes powerful.