Look-See

One year ago this week, Michael and I were in Japan having our "look-see" visit. We flew to Tokyo - a city we agreed to live in sight unseen - to do three things:

1. Apartment hunt;
2. for Michael to hang around his office; and
3. for me to have 60 gazillion interviews with massive-I-feel-like-puking-80%-of-the-time jet lag with the hope that some law firm would hire me so I wouldn't have to sit around for 2 years doing nothing, meanwhile ruining my career.

You know, a relaxing trip.

As many of you can probably attest, the weeks following our look-see were not our smoothest moments. In fact, you probably could have shot a rubber band from our Chicago condo to the moon on all the tension we were harboring. The act of taking things off our bookshelves was enough to bring me to tears, and I am pretty sure I spent the entire summer at work with my office door closed so that no one would notice if I had a spur-of-the-moment breakdown.

But, hey, everything worked out! I got a job - in fact I had several to choose from. We successfully emptied our condo and moved the necessities across the Pacific. Turns out, we are a lot happier having been liberated from all our extraneous junk. Tokyo is a great city - clean, safe, tons of stuff to do. And, as luck would have it, we escaped the US just in time to avoid the financial crisis and landed jobs in Japan that are secure.

Moving to Japan has been a great move for us. Sure, it was stressful. Sure, we had to take a flying leap into the unknown. But it all worked out! Things work out - it was a valuable lesson for us. I think we knew they would, otherwise we wouldn't have embarked upon this adventure, but it is helpful to have the reminder. And jet lag - no longer a big deal.