Yan got word on Thursday that there may be a position in London with his name on it. We've been waiting for an opportunity like this to present itself, although the ironic thing is that after visiting Europe for the first time last month, I had made peace with staying in New York. Two things about London struck me: One, that is very similar to New York, and two, that it has even fewer sunny days than New York does. I love New York, while Yan is lukewarm about it at best--he just doesn't believe the benefits of the city warrant the incredible cost of living. Of course, I made a very deliberate decision to move here from Texas, and he just sort of found himself here, as many New Englanders do. So I appreciate it every day (well, almost), but he would rather be in Boston. Or on the Cape. Or, as luck would have it, in London (he likes London well enough to justify the cost).
Yan is a reporter for a newspaper here, and when we were in London he stopped by that bureau to express our interest in moving there. I had been pressuring him to pursue these kinds of opportunities (London, Hong Kong), which was admittedly pretty silly having never been to the places I was proposing. But after his meeting at the London bureau, he was disappointed to find out that more positions are being eliminated than opened. I was frankly relieved since I spent most of our trip being cold, broke, wet, and well, a little underwhelmed. I found visiting London to be a lot like visiting New York for the first time--I'd seen it so many times in movies and on TV that nothing much was surprising. And it occurred to me that we have friends in New York, where we wouldn't in London, and that every so often we also have sunshine. (Northeasterners will probably disagree with my cynicism on this point but coming from Texas, New York seems very, very gray.) I also remember spending the better part of my first year in New York on my couch--a lonely experience that I'm not dying to repeat.
My other hesitation is that we have such a good life here--we live in a beautiful apartment that we love (with a washer/dryer!) and in a neighborhood that we love, and well, we're just not sure we'll ever have it this good again. In the next few years we'll likely have (or attempt to have) a child and look into purchasing a place to live, which given our price range, will not be as nice as the beautiful place in the convenient neighborhood we currently rent in. And yet.
And yet I think we should do it. Although I'm not a superstitious person, I feel like many things are converging that make this the right thing to do at the right time. We don't yet have a child (I wonder if this was the reason for my hesitation?), we don't yet own a home (perhaps the reason for Yan's hesitation?), and we are both reaching a point in our jobs where we are thinking it might be time to move on. And another bit of serendipity--I work for a European company, and the person at Yan's company who is vacating the open post is leaving it to come work for my company's headquarters in Paris.
What do you think--a sign or no?
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