The Bittersweet Time
It’s a bittersweet time.
The sweetness is in the future adventure, the move to another country – another continent even! – the new people we will meet, the new games we will play, new languages we’ll learn and use, and all the little details of life, like what do we eat and how do we get from place to place. I find these things interesting and I’m looking forward to enjoying these new experiences.
The bitter part is in leaving so much behind. In life, you never know the last time you’ll see someone, but moving so far away from our current home raises the likelihood of this being the case with many of our friends.
But there’s more sweetness in that some of our friends will come visit us in our new home, and it’ll be amazing to get to share with them everything we’ve learned and experienced so far.
Are we ready?
In case you didn’t notice, I like to plan things out a bit. Some things happen a little spur of the moment, like getting married in another state with 2 weeks notice, but even that, we had been talking about off and on for a few years; about as long as we’d been talking about moving internationally.
With this move, we’ve planned a lot out; visited twice, watched videos on Dutch bicycling, made a bunch of spreadsheets…
But in the last year, there has been so much to do and so many projects on our place, that the move has come up on me really quickly. I feel like I’m not ready! On the other hand, would I ever feel 100% ready for this? At some point, there’s no more you can plan, no more you can walk through in your head, and you just have to go and actually do the thing. (That’s a side lesson to you aspiring writers out there, btw.)
So here we go! In 11 days, we leave the country to establish residency in the Netherlands. In the meantime I will enjoy the sweetness of my last day with my cat, of seeing friends and family, of going to GenCon, and then of finally packing our bags for this new adventure.
A going-away dinner with friends at our favorite Pho place, Pho 95.
