What’s next: Updates and intentions

WE HAVE MADE A DECISION ABOUT WHAT’S NEXT!

Yes, after eight months of limbo I do think every letter in that phrase deserves to be a capital.

We are moving to Vientiane – the capital of Laos. Mike has signed a two-year contract to be the Strategic Initiatives Manager for the development organization he works for.

This has all sorts of flow-on implications for the rest of the year. For starters, I can’t stay in Laos during the third trimester of my pregnancy, so I’ll be heading to Australia sometime in mid-May. Thankfully, we can stay up here in Luang Prabang until then (previously we thought we might have to move in April, when Mike’s current contract ends, and house-hunt etc during the hottest month of the year while I was five months pregnant and with a toddler in tow).

So I’ll go to Australia with Dominic in mid-May. Mike will head to Vientiane and work on setting up our lives there before he comes to Australia for the baby’s birth (fingers crossed he doesn’t miss it) in August. We’ll have another month or so apart after baby #2 arrives and then we’ll all head back to Laos together in October.

Phew. That’s a lot of time apart again this year. It seems fitting that I’m still planning to launch my new project – a website on long distance relationships – before I leave Laos, probably in mid-April.

It feels good to have the decision made, yet now that we have the big pieces mapped out we’re realizing just how many little pieces need addressing before mid-May. Things like taxes, and plane tickets, and extending leases, and doctor’s appointments, and organizing moving logistics (we’re still not sure how we’re going to relocate everything we own down south). I prefer this stage of the whole process to the limbo stage, but it can carry with it a particular quality of frantic exhaustion.

One of the things we’ve started doing sometimes to help us focus and (hopefully) stay grounded as the tectonic plates of our lives shift yet again is pick an intention. Some people pick a theme word for their year, others pick a new one every week. Some especially versatile people pick a new theme word every day. Some people make it up as they go along.

That’s me.

My theme word for the last couple of days has been amazement. I read this poem by Mary Oliver recently and it was a good reminder that spending most of your time feeling frantic or exhausted really is a terrible waste. I’m not sure that feeling this way is completely avoidable during seasons like these, but it’s certainly nothing to gracefully accept as the norm.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it is over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

– Mary Oliver

So, amazement. On Sunday we paddled in clear blue waters at a waterfall while baby shrieked and shivered with delight. Yesterday there was a huge full moon – an orange orb lying low above the river. This morning Dominic gave me unsolicited kisses (and one on my elbow for good measure).

And just last night I was awed by my child’s ability to cry with all the focus, energy and anger he could muster for fifteen minutes straight because we would not let him play with the tap he discovered within reach at a restaurant.

Oh, wait, wrong sort of amazement.

It’s a work in progress.

What news in your life? And what amazement?

P.S. Dominic is amazed that after 18 months I still haven’t learned to take spare clothes with me every time in leave the house just in case there’s a disaster of epic pooportions. The lovely Lao women at the cafe were horrified when they saw me preparing to take him home like this and insisted that he was “yen lai” (very cold). Meanwhile, out on the streets, it was almost 90 degrees.