Last night, I was feeling a little reflective. (That sometimes happens after I’ve had a glass of wine. Or three.)
It was dark, the lights out, and everyone else already in bed. I stood on my second-floor balcony overlooking the “lago” outside, and looked up to the moon above. Not a full moon, but it cast a bright light. The area around us was mostly silent, except for the odd passing car in the distance. The only other sound was the wind blowing through the palm trees.
That’s when it hit me. I’m living in Costa Rica.
Yeah yeah, I know, I can hear you now: You’ve been living in Costa Rica since last June, dumbass!
This is my problem: I keep forgetting. It sounds stupid given what we tend to go through every single day (obscenely bad traffic, a different language, dealing with local laws, palm trees in December), but when you work with the same people you worked with before things changed (my “clients” are my former Critical Mass coworkers), there’s a certain amount of stability, too.
When things become overwhelming (e.g. work), they can drown out all the other little things that make life different. So a stable home becomes a constant, traffic is just traffic, and we default to English so much at work that it’s almost hard to remember that we actually took Spanish lessons for a while.
It takes those moments of reflection, when you don’t feel the usual weight of a million problems crushing you (or you’re too inebriated to notice) to reset one’s perspective a bit.
Yes, I live in Costa Rica. Yes, this is a very different place. And despite all the problems we face, it’s still an interesting experience. I just have to make sure I remember that.
