All we have is now. Hope that you are able to make the best of your current situation.

I hope you’ll be in NYC. I would be over the moon to sit with you for a short while and tell you face to face how much your writing means to me.

I can relate to the conflicted sense of belonging. Hence I live 11,000 miles away. Were I to return, it would not be to my island, but the mainland, where there is more room to define who I am outside the shadow of my family and the restrictions I felt so keenly in my growing up years.

As someone who was incredibly directionless, my experience of forcing myself to choose a career placed a certain training path in front of me, and as I’ve followed that path I’ve become much more aligned with my chosen career. The fit has become better with the passing of time, courses and placements. Choosing was the hard thing for me, but once everything got underway it began providing further direction and purpose. You’ve clearly got a lot of skills and abilities, so I hope you can settle on something that will be sufficient to be satisfying – or more.

mea culpa!

Like others, I get it…I am there too…it all hits a little too close to home. There are many of us in similar situations…we feel so much potential bursting at our seams but we all have real physical and social limitations…kids, parents, obligations, health, etc…we long for what could be…knowing all the while that it cannot be…at least not yet. I think many of us out here in blogland are dreamers by nature….we want more, and we know that we can get more…if we’re willing to do what it takes.

I think part of what is difficult for you and Dave is that your adventurous “arc” started relatively early in life…while some people build their life adventures incrementally (a trip a year, etc..)…you and Dave (both separate and apart) seem to have just taken the plunge at an early age, you went for it, which is great.I’m sure it must have been an incredible rush to simply realize that you were capable of thriving independently in various spots around the world.

The problem with that kind of rush tho…or the “arc”…is where do you go from there?

How do you reconcile life’s regular events (good and bad) with that arc….how do you reconcile ease and comfort (which we all crave) with a need for adventure and travel…how do you reconcile real honest-to-god happiness with the euphoria of the unknown.

I’m not sure I know…if I did, I think I’d not be spending as much time pondering the same questions.

We are thinking about a move soon(ish)…and considering how big of a move we are ready to take….alot of these issues are at play…it’s one of those “if we don’t do it now, we likely never will”…and both of us THINK we could do it…But I have spent FAR too much time wondering whether I will regret giving up convenience and comfort for adventure? hard to tell….

that’s where I am at…

As for BlogHer?

It was awesome, but I think if you were there, you would be surprised at how tame it was. After many many conferences, this was lovely and lots of fun and lots of nice people.

And your adventures prior to having children sound amazing. I grew up much too quickly. I bought a house and settled down when I was only 18. I was yearning for stability at the time. But now? Traveling around aimlessly sound thrilling.

Small children do shrink your world. Yes, children are wonderful and marvelous and everything we all know, but they are also a tie-down. And that’s just the way it is.

I would LOVE to go to NYC next year. You know I’ve never been? Never. It’s ridiculous. And the posts about BlogHer (except for Amalah’s, she made it sound like some kind of horrendous sorority party run amok) are all giving me the same picked-last-to-play feeling that they do every year.

*sigh*

As for the cold, I know. If I wake up to one more gray foggy miserable damp soggy morning, I will cry. I just can’t handle too much more of this non-summer crap.

Now, addressing the main point of your post: I think that having small children tends to narrow your horizons and slow time to a crawl. As they get older, your world will likely expand along with theirs. At least, that’s been my experience.