One Life One Encounter

It started, as many stories do, with loss.
My then husband’s mother had fallen ill, and though we didn’t yet have words for it, we both knew — somewhere deep down — that our time with her was slipping away. When we traveled to see her, in early 2014, before she entered hospice just five months later, I think we both felt the quiet pull of life’s impermanence, the way it rearranges your sense of what really matters.

In the space between her diagnosis and her passing, we sold our condo in San Diego — the one we’d bought years earlier when things felt certain and linear. It had been a smart investment, but when we closed on the sale, I remember feeling not relief exactly, but release. A letting go.

We told ourselves we were ready for something new — a move to Austin, maybe. But somewhere between the open houses and the endless packing, a wilder idea began to form. What if, instead of rushing to the next place, we just… went? What if we took a year to travel, to see the world, to press pause on everything we thought life had to be?

At first, it was about escape.
We had come through a rocky season in our marriage the year before, one that left me quietly questioning whether I still wanted to be in it at all. I can’t speak for him, but for me, the idea of leaving — of moving, of traveling — carried a kind of relief. If we could just get out, change the scenery, maybe we could change the story too.

We told ourselves it was about adventure, about experience, about the world as our greatest teacher. But beneath that was something softer, more fragile — a hope that motion might bring clarity, that somewhere between the temples and trains and foreign sunrises, I’d find my way back to myself.

Looking back now, I see that the plan to travel for a year wasn’t really born of wanderlust alone. It was born from a need to feel alive again, to be reminded that life could still surprise me. Maybe even heal me.

In the end, we booked the flights, packed our bags, and called it freedom. Maybe it was. Or maybe it was just the only way we knew how to move forward when standing still had become too heavy. Whatever it was, the moment our feet left the ground, I knew life would never quite look the same again.

That year would go on to unravel and reveal me in ways I could never have imagined — through quiet mornings in borrowed cities, conversations with strangers who became mirrors, and the slow, aching truth of what it means to lose yourself so completely you have no choice but to begin again.

-A