Remember that Big Shift I wrote a bit about (teasingly) in April?

At the end of November my husband and I are going to San Francisco to share Thanksgiving with our family there. The next day, we’re boarding a plane to Portugal.

We have one-way tickets.

A bit more than 10 years ago J. and I were having dinner and I told him that I’d like to get married. Until then, we’d been gently circling around the idea, but when the moment came it was with very little warning. That was a big shift for us.

BIG.

It was a voyage into the unknown, one that has gone places we never expected. We are completely and utterly thrilled at how well its turned out, this bringing two worlds together (kind of an understatement) and our lives are so much richer for making this shift.

Like many, the year (-plus) of COVID has created a huge shift in our lives, one that led to much introspection, discussion, and revising our future plans. A friend calls this Living in Tower Times, referring to the Tower card of the tarot. The Tower warns us of a crisis that shales us to our very foundations, one that will (not might) strip away our precious illusions and cause us to remake our lives.

For us, we began to feel very much like there has to be more to life than  . . .

Of course, like everyone else we were working from home. So many of our personal activities (hobbies, socializing etc…) involve our computers, though, that it felt like we never got up from our desks. The lines between working on my computer for my employer and being on my computer for fun got very blurry. And depressing. On the other hand, the pandemic times also caused us all to stretch our notions of how we stay in touch. It’s not the same as getting together, obviously, but frankly there were some friends and family that we talked to more in the last year than we had in the previous two or three. And finally, being forced to untether from so many of the physical places that were a part of our life (workplaces, restaurants, the homes of friends and so on) that we found ourselves asking just what, exactly, was keeping us where we are? We felt, viscerally and literally, that “tomorrow is promised to no one” and if we want to fulfill our dreams, there really is no reason not to start now.

NOW.

In saying that out loud, our world shifted. The moment the idea of moving away became even a possibility, it quickly began to feel like an inevitability.