travel

Searching for Home

01/25/2019 by John 1 Comment

The first year is hard. That’s what other Americans have told us. They said it took them five years of living in New Zealand before home meant here and not there. We are not even seven months in. Sometimes it feels like the time is flying, at other times crawling. Why are we here? It is breathtakingly beautiful. I like the sociopolitical system better than what currently exists in the United States. People seem happier and friendlier. Are these good enough reasons to call this place home?

Lately, an unconscious silence between Mary and I about discussing going home has lifted. My thoughts are filled with the logistics of going home. I sometimes dream about going home. We said we’d give it a year and it’s barely been six months. We said we’d give it a year, but I don’t think we ever actually agreed on anything. Kind of like we were never explicitly clear about why we came here in the first place. About the best reason we can come up with is that we did it “because we could” and because at some earlier point in life we said we wanted to move to New Zealand. But did “we” say any of this or was it just me? Sometimes it’s hard to untangle the wants and desires of the couple from those of the individual.

Home. I always refer to back there as home, though when I was there, I often felt homeless. Will I ever feel at home anywhere? Sometimes I glimpse it in the quiet spaces when my mind is still. I see it in the sunrise. I feel it when I am in the presence of love and laughter. I know that home is not a place. It is a way of being, one that I have difficulty maintaining during the tumult of everyday life.

Looking Back on 2018

01/11/2019 by John 1 Comment

Makara Peak, Wellington, New Zealand

2018 was a year of contrasts. I spent the first half of the year ping-ponging around the Eastern United States and the second half tethered to a small apartment half a world away in New Zealand. In January I had a pretty good sense of who I was, but by the fall, much of that had been dismantled. It was a strange year.

I spent some time recently looking back on the past year in an effort to better prepare myself for 2019. While doing an exercise designed to aid in this process, I was asked to come up with three words to describe 2018. For me, they were the following.

Change
Friendship
Identity

Change was ever present in 2018. That and it’s moody twin brother uncertainty. Much of the first half of the year was spent wondering where we would be sleeping the next week. We watched our savings account dwindle as we waited to hear back about job interviews and work visas. Upon arriving in New Zealand, we lived in four different places in the first month we were here. It was unsettling.

Throughout all of this change, friendship provided us the strength and support we so desperately needed. The first half of 2018 I was fortunate to be able to spend quality time with many of the people in my life that mean the most to me. Since arriving in New Zealand, we have met some incredible people who have opened up their homes and their hearts to welcome us.

I have already written about losing my identity since being here. Though I’m becoming more comfortable with who I am now, it is still a big challenge. 2019 will be a lot about how this struggle plays out.

2018 was a year I won’t soon forget. Through change and uncertainty, friendship kept us afloat. And while the search for identity continues, I welcome the opportunity to keep exploring what it means to be me when everything around me is different.

Whoops, I Lost My identity

08/16/2018 by John 4 Comments

Mary got to bring a big part of her identity with her to New Zealand. I had to leave a large portion of mine behind. This is having more of an effect on me than I thought it would. Or maybe, I never thought that much about it until we got here.

Without the connections I have back in the States, I knew that coming here meant that I would not be able to do the work that I was doing back home. What I did not realize was how deeply entrenched my sense of self was tied into working for Outward Bound and being a bicycle tour guide. Even though for years now I’ve felt that I wanted to move away from those things, I had no idea how much importance I had placed in them to help me define who I am. These roles I played provided me with a sense of self-worth. It’s easy to feel good about yourself when you can tell people you work for the North Carolina Outward Bound School and that you “help people discover more about themselves, others, and the world around them through challenging experiences in unfamiliar settings”.

I am stripped down and now wonder who I am supposed to be now that my costume is gone. I scan through the want ads, questioning what I see. Can I be a personal assistant? A baker? A deckhand for the ferry? How about a customer service representative, a university admissions counselor, or a real estate agent assistant? Could any of these things be me? I think I would like working with computers making beautiful web pages, but I look at the qualifications for those jobs and know that I would never be called for an interview. And after all the cups I have drunk, I don’t even have enough experience to make coffee in this caffeine-crazed town.

I know that a job is not all that defines a person. I call myself a runner, a writer, a husband, and a friend. These things are all well and good so why can’t I just be satisfied with that? Today, I’ll go to work taking orders and making tacos. There will be moments when I will enjoy it and there will be times when I will be wondering why I’m there. But underlying it all will be the question “is this it?” With nearly fifty years of life experience here I am working a barely more than minimum wage job.

I know I will reach the other side of this. I don’t know what I’ll find there or who I will be when I get there. That’s part of the adventure I guess. I know this is one of those times in life when growth will occur, perhaps even a metamorphosis. I am curious to see how it all turns out and what I will be doing a year from now. But in the meantime, the growing pains are difficult as I walk around this new world and wonder who I’m going to be.