Happiness is getting your visas

I love the New Zealand embassy in DC. Our visas arrived. They turned around our 150 page visa application in just over 24 hours, and they arrived back to my hot little hands on August 4th. Did I mention that I love the embassy?

I recently read the book The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner and have been thinking a lot about it in reference to our trip. It is a memoir in which Weiner, a foreign correspondent for NPR, travels to some of the world's most statistically contented countries in the world, and tries to figure out what defines happiness, how culture contributes to happiness (or not) and what this means for how we walk through the world.

I keep thinking about this as people keep asking me the $64,000 question: Why are you guys doing this?

The short answer is that we are doing for the kids (of course). We wanted to show them the world. We wanted them to experience other ways to live than just the way they live now. We wanted them to know other cultures are out there and that America is not the one and only way to be in the world.

The long answer is more complicated. We are doing it for ourselves. (I say we, but I can only speak for myself. I assume I know what Steve thinks, but the truth is I am wrong 85-100% of the time.) I want to go back to a time, before kids, when Steve and I traveled, had adventures, had simpler lives with fewer meaningless attachments -- to things -- and more meaningful attachments -- to people and experiences. I want to be freer.

As a therapist, I know well about the efficacy in the geographical solution approach to problem solving in life: move and leave the problem behind. It doesn't work. Damn if you don't bring yourself along. I have had to ask myself if if this is what this trip was about, a geographical solution. But I don't think it is or maybe it is, but it has to be. That is just the nature of the beast. Nothing is wrong with our life here. It is pretty darn good. We (there I go again), I have community, professional and creative goals and accomplishments. But I do think that freedom from stuff and expectation and scripts is hard in America. I don't wonder if that is part of our cultural soup that gives flavor to our particular brand of happiness here. As Americans we are tied to what we own or achieve; less to what we experience or simply are. It will be interesting to see if it is any different in New Zealand or if it is just here with an accent. (If it is...next stop India.)

So now we are packing and saying goodbye: to things, to people, to places. Every day it is the last day we see someone, or the last day we go to a particular place, the last chance to do a particular activity. We had to say a very painful farewell yesterday, to our gecko, Twiddler. He was not been well this whole year and he passed on to the great terrarium in the sky. Happy, healthy hunting dear Twiddler.