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Countdown New Zealand Day 14

05/23/2020 by John Leave a Comment

This is a series of posts that will log some of my thoughts in the month leading up to my moving back to New Zealand.

This is one of those moments when life feels full of possibility. I am ready to move to New Zealand and make it my permanent home. I know this feeling will ebb and flow, that there will be moments after we get there when I’ll wonder if we’ve done the right thing. But those moments will happen no matter what we do.

I think of sunny days sitting outside on Oriental Bay drinking a coffee. I think about running up, over, and around the hills surrounding Wellington, of coming to the top of Mount Albert and seeing the South Island thrusting out of the waters across Cook Strait. I know that memory is kind. The hard times we had there have faded but the evidence of them can be found in my journals. It won’t be easy, but few things in life worth doing ever are.

I’m so glad we came here. And I’m so glad we get to go back there.

Countdown New Zealand Day 15

05/22/2020 by John Leave a Comment

This is a series of posts that will log some of my thoughts in the month leading up to my moving back to New Zealand.

I picture us living in a small home with a decent sized yard on the outskirts of a small town in New Zealand. From the windows, we look out at the mountains framed by a brilliant blue sky. It is a simple life. We rent out some space of some sort to people traveling through and in this way stay connected to the larger world. There is a garden that allows us to produce much of the fresh food that we need. We diligently can and freeze the excess for the colder months. Every morning we go down the street for a coffee and read books from the local library. When we have free time we drive the van out to the beach. We deepen our practices: meditation, yoga, journaling.

Money? We don’t need much. Just enough.

Doesn’t all that sound nice? And yet, once again I look to an imagined future for my salvation instead of the present moment. The only relief to be found is right here, right now. It is in the hum of the refrigerator, the taste of my coffee, and the feel of the breath moving in and out of my body.

My tendency is to look outside of myself for comfort. If only I had this. When I achieve that. When I meet the right person. All of this, a fool’s errand. And though I know this to be true, I still default to having my eyes set firmly on the horizon instead of on the ground on which I stand.

Countdown New Zealand Day 16

05/21/2020 by John Leave a Comment

This is a series of posts that will log some of my thoughts in the month leading up to my moving back to New Zealand.

We are disassembling our life. Again. May is the month we tend to do this. Last May, we began the process of moving back to the States. May of 2018 we disassembled so that we could move to New Zealand. In May of 2015, we were leaving Asheville to begin a road trip that feels like it still hasn’t met its end.

I’m hoping things around the house look better by the end of the day. I suspect that they will. There is a time period during a disassembly that things look hopeless. There are piles everywhere and you have no idea where they are going to go. But eventually, these mounds get tucked into bags or boxes, redistributed or discarded until with a sudden sense of relief you look around and there is nothing left to squirrel away. Well, there’s always something. Usually, whatever this is just ends up getting tucked it into a closet somewhere for the new occupants to deal with.

It’s no wonder we’ve procrastinated our way into a stressful situation once again. The act of disassembling your life is not pleasant. It involves sorting through piles of things I’ve come to identify as part of me and then deciding which ones to keep and which to discard. My tendency is to want to hold on to all of my pieces, just in case I need them again someday.

Even though it stresses me out, I’ve become good at disassembling my life. But now I really wish I could be better at assembling one. Destruction comes easily for me. Creation, not so much. I don’t know how to break out of this pattern I have created. I don’t know how to stay.

Am I having regrets? It’s difficult to tease out. But it does not matter much at this point. This is how it is right now. This is the only place from which we can move forward.