Leave the great indoorsnotes on the journey

It’s been just over a year since my wife and I decided to move from San Francisco to Cape Town. Since then we had a baby, I changed jobs, and we systematically packed up our lives and moved here in March this year.

When we first started planning the move, we agreed on one thing: it’s going to be difficult as hell, but it is a story we have to live. What I kept saying to Jess was this: The next year is not going to be easy. It’s too much change, and too much uncertainty, too quickly. But we needed to remember that a year down the road it was going to be September in Cape Town. It would be Spring, and we’d wake up to a sunrise over Table Mountain, and we’d suddenly be ok.

Last night our almost-1-year-old slept through the night, something she’s done maybe 10 nights since she was born. This morning I went for a run on the Sea Point Promenade and witnessed that sunrise over Table Mountain. I had a perfect cappuccino at Origin.  And then I got an SMS from my wife to say that our daughter cut her 7th tooth. Also, someone I respect unfollowed me on Twitter, but you know, in the bigger scheme of things that’s probably ok.  So yes, I’d say that we’re home now, and that everything is going to be all right.

I have written before about how instrumental Donald Miller was to us during our moving process, and today I was reminded again of this quote from A Thousand Miles to a Thousand Years:

We get robbed of the glory of life because we aren’t capable of remembering how we got here. When you are born, you wake slowly to everything. Your brain doesn’t stop growing until you turn twenty-six, so from birth to twenty-six, God is slowly turning the lights on, and you’re groggy and pointing at things saying circle! and blue! and car! and then sex! and job! and health care!

The experience is so slow you could easily come to believe life isn’t that big of a deal, that life isn’t staggering. What I’m saying is I think life is staggering and we’re just used to it. We all are like spoiled children no longer impressed with the gifts we’re given — it’s just another sunset, just another rainstorm moving in over the mountain, just another child being born, just another funeral.

So, hey. Let’s allow ourselves to be awed every once in a while, ok?