I have been away both from writing and KL – the writing for a significantly longer time than I was away from KL.

When I arrived here in September I had it in my head that I would figure out how I was going to do the expat lifestyle after my eldest son’s wedding in the last weekend in February. There were good reasons for this – it have us two to three months to get settled into a new apartment and figure stuff out. There was a good ten weeks of my youngest son’s school holidays to navigate plus Christmas and the wedding itself.

Part of this plan was to take J back to New Zealand for the start of the school year,  go to my favourite tech conference, catch up with friends, and spend some time in Christchurch which included possibly exploring the option of doing some study. Of course nothing ever turns out quite as it is planned and while I did most of those things I did some other options which I hadn’t planned plus children being children – the coming year is already taking on a far different shape to how I anticipated it.

Despite my husband being concerned from the tone of my communications that I might not come back with him after the wedding, here I am sitting at the dining room table (which he had moved while I was away) looking over the KL skyline and beginning to plot and  plan. One of the plans is to get back to the discipline of writing.

You see – somewhere in that month in New Zealand a couple of almost contradictory ideas formed. The first was that I didn’t really feel at home in the sense of belonging. I enjoyed the break from the heat but I was more invested in figuring out how to live my life here than in New Zealand. The second was (and this has happened before) that it is not an all or nothing kind of deal. I can still spend quite a bit of this year in New Zealand if that is what we need to do to be available for our children as they navigate life transitions.

In the meantime I have to work out a way of getting things done I want to do while I am here and have the time to do it – an off hand comment by someone at a Webstock workshop shook me up a bit. I realised that I had been gifted with the time to be creative and exploratory and I needed to make the most of it. Having listened to Cindy Gallup talking about the value of micro-actions I’m taking that to heart and planning the micro-action I’ll take today to get started on some of the ideas.