This is a Really Bad Metaphor

I am a mess of emotions right now -- a fondue pot of gooey, cheesy joy bubbling excitedly, steeped in booze. Hm, that doesn't sound as good as I thought it would.

It just hit me that we are going home in less than a week. My head has known this for a long time, but my heart just understood it today, a few seconds ago, while I was shelling pistachios. I'm excited to go home -- to hug my mom and sisters, to see my friends, to go back to the lives we put on hold and figure out a way to make it work a little better for us. We're entering an experimental phase, one where we'll finally get to see if we did learn anything, if anything has changed. Our reactions to the environment we are in will be the gauge over the next while, especially since the first few months are bound to be a little hectic.



After much reflection, discussion, and analysis (Excel may or may not have been used) we have decided to return to Toronto. It's true that other cities were definitely on the list of nominees, but in the end, Toronto is home. We're working on the jobs, and we're beginning to look at cars and places to live. In a lot of ways, it looks like we're returning to our lives very much The Way They Were; in our opinion, the outer shell of life may look identical, but the inner workings will change fundamentally. We hope to be able to dig in our heels and not get caught up in the tornado that is city life so that we can spend less time fretting about the things that don't matter and spend more time doing the things that do. We hope to live less selfishly, to take less and to use less. We hope to give more instead, as we've learned how that endless cliche about giving and receiving is actually really true.

Expect to see us outdoors more and at the office less. Expect to see us smiling more, arguing less. Quality over quantity, meaningfulness over convenience. Culture and learning over television, family and friends over mindless surfing. We'll take courses; we'll volunteer. We'll join clubs, read books, babysit; BG may possibly explore the world of yoga. We'll do more things together too -- after all, 15 months of nearly continuous companionship means we'll likely feel kind of lost without each other, at least for a little while.

In the meantime, we have five days left in Switzerland, and there's chocolate to be eaten. See you soon.