A Second Act doesn’t always mean a new job.
Sometimes it means a new city.
Earlier this month, after more than a decade of talking about it, my wife Rachel and I packed up our lives in Colorado and landed in Berlin with our two daughters. Four humans, four suitcases, and a decade’s worth of “someday” finally cashed in.
Getting here was one of the hardest things we’ve ever done.
New passports. A visa for Rachel. Schools for the kids. A long-distance apartment hunt in a hyper-competitive rental market. Learning how to navigate a foreign healthcare system while managing an autoimmune disease. Last-minute CT scans, blood draws, and a colonoscopy. Migrating our phone numbers. Opening a bank account. Finding renters for our house. Selling our two cars, one less than 24 hours before we left.
Any one of those, on its own, is a normal week of adulting. Stacked on top of each other, with a deadline and an ocean on the other side, they had a way of arriving all at once.
There were moments when we came very close to quitting.
But we didn’t.
And right now I feel exhausted, stressed, grateful, and more alive than I have in years. (Some of that may be the espresso talking.)
I think a lot about midlife restlessness. It’s a topic I explore constantly with my clients. That feeling that you’ve built something real, yet something still isn’t quite right. That the life you’re living may not be the life you truly want.
What I’ve learned, both from my clients and from my own experience, is that restlessness usually points to something. And that we’re capable of much bigger moves than we give ourselves credit for.
My wife and I are calling the year ahead a sabbatical, a word that comes from “Sabbath.” We’ll continue with our coaching careers, but like a Sabbath, we want it to feel genuinely different from the years that preceded it. A chance to slow down, look up, and let new experiences shape whatever comes next.
We don’t have it all figured out.
We have a city, a school for our kids, and a whole lot of curiosity.
I’ll leave you with a question I often ask my clients:
What’s been sitting in your “someday” drawer, getting a little dustier every year?
And more importantly: what might it take to finally open it?