Hello readers!
Halfway through the year 2024 and midway through our life, we were fed up. D had been working for Edward Jones for a decade and was daily mired down by burdensome technological problems and an ever more convoluting, bureaucratic managerial system. He did not feel valued as a hard-working and conscientious employee; nor did he feel he was properly compensated for his productivity in gaining new clients as well as integrity in treating his existing clients. They kept putting pressure on him and other advisors to impose arbitrary charges and fees on his clients so that they acquired more profits to fund their speedy organizational enlargement. D realized that he would have to end up compromising his professional integrity if staying with Edward Jones.
On other levels–personal, social and developmental–we felt stagnated and increasingly discouraged both individually and as a family. At J2′ elementary school in Campbellsville, Kentucky, he was not challenged academically while socially stressed out every day even though he was enrolled in a project-based program designed for more gifted students. J1 was not getting the support he needed to thrive even though he was enrolled in a STEM Academy for gifted students in math and science in Bowling Green, Kentucky.
In Kentucky, I led a socially isolated existence. I tried to make friends, but all my efforts were not productive, and I was not able to create any meaningful and long-term connections with any of the local people. I want a mutually supportive yet unintrusive and undemanding kind of friendship with other people, especially with other women. I am willing to spend time exchanging ideas and doing interesting things with other like-minded people outside our home. However, I still need to maintain my privacy and autonomy so that I can function well as a learning individual, a companionable wife and a caring mother. Our boys were younger in Kentucky, which required me to focus on home life, cooking and some essential housework. During the day when my husband was at work and our boys were at school, I did yoga or mat Pilates, learn French or Spanish and read both fiction and non-fiction books. I want the type of friendship that fits in with my life and not other way around. One of the major obstacles to connecting with people in Kentucky is that I was not born and raised there. Most people already have existing friendships formed from their school days. Another is that I was not working in a regular job where many people form their social connections. There is a social network of home-schooling parents in our small town, but I was not a home-schooling mother. Consequently, in that small town, I simply did not fit into any social circle on my own terms.
Our relationships with our extended families on both sides of the Pacific Ocean were steadily disintegrating over the years and over the course of all of us growing up and growing older. As we matured, we sought more privacy and boundaries from people who apparently don’t hold our best interests at heart, whereas those same people would constantly demand more attention and acquiescence from us. Those older than we are in our extended families would vie for more time from and influence over us so that their social and emotional needs got met. At the same time, we as individuals and a family would need space and support in order to gain balance, wholeness and optimal development. We simply could not afford to incorporate the personal and relational conflicts of people in our extended families into our life.
All things considered, we had enough and needed to make a radical change to our life so that our priorities of balance, wholeness and optimal development remain intact. We thus changed all the professional and educational institutions we were associated with as well as the location of our residence. We also took initiatives to protect our privacy by keeping our address undisclosed to extended families and to Internet search. And we continue our adventures in self-discovery on a bolder, slower and more intentional living journey.
I started this blog not just to recount our family story but also to hope to inspire others to live boldly and follow their dreams. If you feel your life is stagnated or if you would like to live a richer life mentally, emotionally and especially spiritually, I hope you find inspirations here to make changes, however minuscule. I believe each individual is unique and should discern their own pathway in the vast ocean of life. If you feel a nagging discontent that prevents you from tasting the goodness of life and from knowing the joy of living, perhaps you should take heed of your inner voice so as to find out your unique needs and wants. I believe that as living beings we are meant to give of our gifts and talents to our immediate environment in order to enrich this life in a multitude of ways. And once we discover our unique talents and callings, we will be able to make our distinct contributions to our family, community and society. Being able to do so will help us become whole and fulfilled.
For further contemplation on living and especially on making important life changes, here are powerful poems by Mary Oliver (1935-2019), a Pulitzer Prize winning poet:
The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
The Journey
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice-
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life that you could save.
Bold, Slow and Intentional 