Not A Million Miles Away

Today my wife starts a new job.  It’s a big change for her.  A new industry.  A vast role with a lot of responsibility.  Helping clean up her LinkedIn profile over the weekend, before the inevitable journalistic examination, I couldn’t help but be impressed by the roles she has succeeded in and the regard her coworkers and colleagues have for her.

I seldom write about my family.  I did break that rule once before to explain what being married to a successful women means to me.  As important as privacy is, there were some things that needed to be said and to be frank, some people that needed to be put in their place.

I’m writing now because this move is also part of my healing after the health concerns of last year.  Her previous employer was a great company in many ways. But facing uncertain times in a challenging industry cast a long shadow on its employees.  For us, with a daughter coming to the end of her high school days, it created a lot of stress.

For me, it was awake at night, eating out my insides stress.  Every time I tried to write a goal, tried to wrap my head around a big project, I couldn’t.  The thought of having to cope with a massive disruption in our lives, to move to another country and resettle with little time to plan, at this moment in our lives, having just started to generate momentum for my work in Japan, my daughter having so little of her choosing left, it all felt like too much.

So, this new job for my wife is more than just a milestone in her career, it’s also a chance for us to make more concrete plans for our lives, for my daughter’s end to her high school and for my work.  It’s a commitment to what we’ve built here in Tokyo and also permission to dream a little about the next stage in our lives.

It won’t be easier.  We’ll be apart more than we’d like at times.  We three, in our respective lanes, all have to swim hard to reach our goals.  But, we can now make goals, clear ones within our power to reach.  This feels so deeply liberating that I can’t even express how thankful I am start on this new journey together.