New Zealand

Countdown New Zealand Day 6

05/31/2020 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.

Yesterday we drove across five states en route to Philadelphia to visit family before departing for New Zealand. It was a strange experience across a disjointed society. At some stops, the vast majority of people we encountered were wearing face coverings while at others virtually nobody was. In the hotel lobby, there were competing news broadcasts showing protesters across the country reacting to the murder of George Floyd and a President who threatens to use “vicious dogs” and “ominous weapons” on them.

How did it come to this? I look around me and I see a country that seems to want to light itself on fire. I feel like I don’t understand my country anymore. This is one reason I am moving to New Zealand.

I love the United States. Watching it fall into such disarray breaks my heart. I feel like I’m leaving the States at a time of need that I have no idea how to fill.

Countdown New Zealand Day 7

05/30/2020 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.

The earth rotates into the light of the sun here as it rotates away from it in New Zealand. The world is a big and marvelous place and life is both long and too short. Why spend your whole life in one country when you could also live in another? To each his own I know. Some of us feel so connected to the places we grew up in. Some of us don’t.

Countdown New Zealand Day 8

05/29/2020 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.

Today we left the biggest house we’ve ever lived in to begin our move back into a tiny apartment. I fear that the downsizing will come as quite a shock, even though we’ve lived there before and should know what we’re getting ourselves into. But after spending two weeks quarantined in a hotel room, perhaps our two room flat with its big views and access to hills and beaches only minutes away won’t feel so small after all.

The moving boxes left yesterday. All eight of them. I have no idea where their contents will go once we see them three or four months from now. Fortunately, that’s a problem for another day.

During the past few days as we’ve been squeezing items into boxes and duffle bags, we’ve also been trying to squeeze in time with the people we love. But there is never enough of it. It is such a waste to have to spend so much time dealing with stuff that there is not enough left over for people. This is another one of those repeating patterns in my life, one that I’d like to break.