I Still Can’t Believe

“I still can’t believe you guys are actually here.”

These were my brother’s words, a few weeks after we moved to Sri Lanka. We had lived in the US for eighteen years.

We were hanging out at Beach Park in Colombo, an oceanfront cafe and bar that soon became our family’s favorite weekend spot.

I had already given notice at work, pregnant with my daughter, our second. We packed eight suitcases and moved halfway across the world with our then two-year-old.

We didn’t know how long we were staying. Friends called the move brave. Courageous. To us, it was an experiment in many ways.

It began with one conversation. A moment within it, really.

For weeks after a retreat that December, I’d been talking about wanting to be closer to family, to see them more. My husband had been listening.

We were on our date at the Walk Up in Cary when he threw out the idea to move. The thought had come to him during a deep tissue massage. My eyes lit up, and I jumped onboard that stream of wonder and dream.

Moving home was a dream I had talked about for years. After a pandemic and a financial crisis in Sri Lanka, it had felt more and more distant.

Yet in this moment of wonder, everything seemed possible.

Maybe it’s the clarity about what’s important in life at that moment. Maybe it’s the excitement of making a dream come true.

The dreaming was followed by conversations about logistics and finances. We leaned on family, friends, and my coach, taking the next small step even when the full plan wasn’t clear.

Nearly two years later, we moved back to the US. Now I sit by the lake at Bond Park in Cary, thinking about the big decisions we make.

On Friday, I was sitting with some heavy feelings. A post led me to the book Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le Cunff. I listened on my run, and just the first forty minutes turned my mood around.

I’ve always loved experimenting. And yet here I am, still needing a little encouragement to follow my curiosity.

Some changes come uninvited. A layoff. Illness. Burnout we can no longer ignore. That kind of change carries its own weight.

Maybe there’s room for wonder, even in a difficult season.

And what if we didn’t need the whole plan to try one small experiment?