I never thought lightly about moving from the United States to Germany.
I agonized over the decision. I lost sleep over the process. I worked through feelings of guilt and of shame. I called myself a coward and a fool. Together, Chris and I talked and rehashed and cried and daydreamed and put the rubber to the road to make this move.
Every step was taken with intention, even days when the whole plan felt reckless. Even when we were told that this was a terrible idea and that it’d never work. We looked for the next right step and took it as a team.
We’re still in that process, choosing how to structure our time and prioritize our resources. We’re still very much in the weeds of figuring out how to make this experience permanent. But in the past six weeks or so--not since New Years but since sometime in February--we’ve found a rhythm to our intentionality that has unlocked some really interesting ideas and insights.
These ideas are nascent, and that’s not what I want to hit on here today. There will come a time to transplant these germinating insights into the public domain, but for now I want to talk about how the experience living in Germany has helped us cultivate the soil in which we’re farming.
It starts with a haircut I got last week. I was in desperate need of shedding 8 or 10 inches of wild split ends and after a quick Google search, I went into a run-of-the-mill kind of place in the basement of the mall. The reviews were positive and I’m not one who’s looking for the $100+ salon experience. I wanted a shampoo and a significant chop--nothing extravagant.
This was the most thorough, relaxing haircut I have ever had. The place was spotless, the staff were professional in a severe, German kind of way. For 10€ they shampooed and conditioned my hair and gave me a scalp massage. And not just a perfunctory rub in the conditioner kind of scalp massage, full pressure on all of those scalp bone fusions. I knew I needed something, but I had no idea that was the answer.
The woman who did my hair then proceeded to spend over 45 minutes cutting and shaping my hair. The appointment was only a 30 minute slot, but I guess business was slow that day. While every haircut at a comparable salon in the USA has divided my hair into four or five sections, she worked in four or five layers of 4-5 sections. It was a painstaking effort.
She matched this effort with a thorough blow-dry and I paid the 50€ cost plus a small, non-mandatory tip. My 30 minute appointment had taken over an hour. I left feeling like a million bucks.
Pride in one's work is a theme I’m beginning to notice here. I’ve had two mani/pedis that have outlasted anything I ever had done in the USA. When I mortifyingly dropped a box of blueberries in the grocery store aisle, no one rolled their eyes at me when I asked for help. The shopkeepers here, especially the flower merchants, spend hours setting up and taking down their sidewalk stalls every day, painstakingly arranging the décor and the seasonal blossoms. Even ever-present construction projects are finished by manually fitting the cobblestones back together to repair the sidewalk.
Intention just oozes from life here. People are working hard, but no one is hustling in the same way that I’ve come from those trying to make ends meet in the USA. People genuinely seem to care about their jobs and about the way they spend their time. It shows. In the haircuts and the manicures, yes, but also in the vibe. People aren’t rushing as much, there’s a lot more room in life to breathe and enjoy the moment.
I have described my status to Chris as feeling like my spring is unwinding. Like I’m recalibrating in a productive and healthy way, not feeling the itch to hustle every moment. I’ve been leaving my phone at home to go sit in the park or at a café and just think. And the ideas are coming. I’ve given myself the intentional time to turn on the tap and see what flows, and I’m certain that would have been impossible in the business-as-usual-amidst-major-systematic-failures approach. I can’t even imagine what it would have been like if we had stayed and experienced this new administration first hand, it’s hard enough with the Atlantic buffer.
There are real traumas that I’m unpacking from my life in the USA. I realized when we were first here in 2019 and were well provided for with health insurance, accessible family-friendly activities, fresh groceries, ample nature, no guns, and walkable infrastructure that life can look a lot different than what we all accept as the status quo in American cities. Furthermore, I found out quickly that taking long weekends every week didn’t actually cause my professional productivity to plummet. In fact, the opposite happened. I had more energy, more creativity, and better efficiency across four days of work when those other three days were spent relaxing and exploring than I ever did from a seven-day hustle. Maybe not the life-changing Fulbright experience they expected me to have, but certainly the one I needed.
It’s taken six months and a resignation to the flow of life to find the mindset I need to carry this process through. Things are far from settled, but despite this uncertainty and amidst the precarious geopolitics of the present day, I can rest assured that my intentions and actions are aligned.