In Between Days: Living in Sweden and figuring out what’s next

Well, we did it. We packed up all of our house – the furniture, the artwork, books, music – and movers took it to storage. It was surreal and sad to see all of our things shoved into two storage units, not quite as perfectly packed as it was in the moving van to come to Europe, but still pretty wedged in. And now, as of today, we are without a home. That’s an even more difficult place to be and I have to say that I feel adrift. While I love traveling, I also love having a home as an anchor.

For the moment, we are staying at our friends Jodi and Doug’s place, watching it and their dog while they are on holiday. From there, I will spend some time in the US with family, Robert will spend some time in Germany working. We will also meet up and travel a little together.

Why are we putting ourselves through all this torture, you ask? Well, it’s complicated. We are trying to figure out after living in Sweden for almost eight years, if we still want to be here. We are trying to figure out if we would prefer to live somewhere else in Europe or even  Australia – Robert has not lived there since 1998 and while I’ve visited more than 10 times, I’ve never lived there. Perhaps just as importantly, we are both trying to figure out new business ventures. And while all this up in the air stuff was going on, we unfortunately had to leave our rental apartment as we only had a short contract for it. Bad timing. It would have been nice to have one grounded part of life in the midst of all this, but that wasn’t the way things worked.

When the last of the moving and cleaning was done this afternoon, I was empty. Flat. Exhausted in every way. But now over the last two hours, I’ve gotten contemplative. While these are certainly in between days, I feel like some good changes are coming our way.