What It’s Like to Move Away From North America and Return For a Visit

In the summer of 2024 we took our family of four on a five-week trip to Canada and Minnesota to reconnect with friends and family after living in Costa Rica for a year. We had a full schedule, went on many adventures, changed locations ten times, and managed to do it all with smiles on our faces. 

Rather than recount all the happenings of the trip, I find it more useful to reflect on my biggest takeaways and lessons learned, so with that spirit in mind, here are my most potent reflections about making my way around North America no longer as a resident, but as a visitor. 

LESSON 1 – ASKING FOR HELP IS HARD, AND IT’S WORTH IT

Something about my conditioning has made it extremely challenging for me to ask for help. I notice this all the time in my everyday life. I would rather use every finger and balance stuff on my shoulders and head to carry everything from my car to my house rather than ask my empty-handed neighbor that’s walking by, “Hey, could you give me a hand with this?” which they would surely do with pleasure.  

But time and time again on this trip, I was confronted with a choice. I could either do things like spend lots of money (on rental cars, hotels, items I needed) or go without a thing I didn’t pack (like a beach towel or the appropriate footwear for a certain activity), or I could ask a friend for help. 

I ended up asking for more favors in a five-week span than in any other five-week chunk of time in my life. 

• We borrowed vehicles from friends in both Canada and Minnesota, saving thousands of dollars in rental car fees. We weren’t even that close to our Minnesota friends, and our Canada friends not only lent us their vehicle but also picked us up from the airport late at night with their kids in tow. Unbelievable and staggering levels of generosity! 
• We slept over at friends’ and neighbors’ houses. We used their sheets, burned their firewood, and messed up their rooms with unshelved toys. At one house I even asked to borrow a towel the next morning for a volleyball session. 
• I organized a day of Bro Games, but I barely brought any gear–I had to rely on my friends to bring everything and make the event happen. 
• People cooked countless meals for me, and prepared other food when one of my kids didn’t like what was served (major parenting pride-swallowing, go-with-the-flow and accept the help challenge!). 

All of this receiving was hard. For me, it’s easier to give, to be generous, to help someone out. What’s much harder is to ask for help or to receive an unrequested yet helpful offer. It sounds backwards, but that’s how it is. 

Being showered with all this attention and generosity leaves me feeling supported. Moved. Loved. It’s humbling to acknowledge that there are people out there in the world–people who have their own struggles and challenges and hardships and trauma and careers–who go out of their way to help me out, to make my life more smooth, to bring me more joy. 

Asking for help is hard for me, yes, but ultimately, after moving through the discomfort, it leaves me with the fulfilling feelings of humility and gratitude.

If you’re reading this and you helped me or my family on our trip, you have my warm and deep appreciation. Thank you! 

LESSON 2 – THE ABUNDANT CONVENIENCE OF AMERICAN CAPITALISM IS NICE, BUT IT’S TOO MUCH

Upon return to North America, I was immediately struck by just how convenient life is. Paved, lit roads with multiple lanes and large shoulders, liquor stores with craft beer selections as far as the eye can see, paper towel dispensers in public bathrooms. Things that once felt normal now seem magical.

On our way back to my uncle’s house in the Toronto area, it was late and I wanted to get gas before arriving at his house, because we had a big drive the next day and I wanted to avoid having one extra thing to do in the morning. We were five minutes away from his house in the suburbs and, thankfully, there was a gas station on the way. We stopped to fill up, and in the remaining four minutes of the drive to his residential neighborhood we passed by no fewer than three more gas stations!  

By living in our beachy, somewhat remote area of Costa Rica, many American modern conveniences like this are not available. Our closest gas station is a twenty minute drive away. I have to plan out our next fill up. And yet, I am not unhappy. That inconvenience doesn’t upset me; it’s just how life is here.

Take another example–after a long travel day to get back to Costa Rica at the end of our trip, after waking up at 2:45 am, sprinting Home Alone-style to our connecting flight in Miami, finally arriving, getting our truck, and driving the 90 minutes from the airport back to our house, in addition to unpacking we still had to buy groceries at two different stores, cook dinner, and wash the dishes; there ain’t no drive-thru’s here. But it wasn’t a huge pain. We just… did it. In fact, it actually felt nice to be back in my own kitchen, chopping locally grown vegetables and eating food that didn’t come wrapped in a package that was then put into another larger package to be driven by a delivery driver to my front door. 

We are all very adaptable, and it feels like my neighborhood in Costa Rica has enough convenience for me without being super overdeveloped. Yes we have to plan out when our next trip to the gas station will be, but I prefer that over there being 2-3 gas stations at every intersection in town. We don’t need that. But that’s what happens when capitalism gets taken to the extreme and we move from progress into overshoot (“when something moves beyond the point at which it can be sustained,” as defined in the book Active Hope). 

Don’t get me wrong, I ate my share of takeout while I was in North America, but the difference for me now is having the perspective that getting to dine on jalapeno scallion cream cheese wontons dipped in a mulberry sauce (courtesy of St. Louis Park’s Wok In The Park) is not just a typical thing that all beings can access–it’s a truly miraculous treat to appreciate, savor, and marvel at, and maybe even take a moment to consider what trade offs am I accepting by making the choice to eat them.  

LESSON 3 – I PREFER CONNECTION TIME OVER EPIC ADVENTURES 

Upon knowledge of our visit, several of our friends and family members wanted to pull out all the stops for our time together by planning excursions to places like Canada’s Wonderland, a waterpark, or the Minnesota State Fair. Even though our family had a great time at all of those destinations and wonderful memories were made, I found the experiences to fall short when reflecting on their costs and benefits. I learned that I value quality, uninterrupted connection time more than the thrill of a ride, even more than the thrill of watching my child enjoy a ride. And when it comes to comparing an intimate, deep conversation with a friend about their health to busting through crowds with them in order to wait in a sweaty line so that we could pay for a grossly overpriced bucket of poorly baked chocolate chip cookie dough, well… for me, there’s no comparison. I’ll take the convo on a couch 7 days a week. 

Now, to be fair, sometimes as parents we prioritize our kids, and we make choices that put their desires ahead of our own. Of course it’s more boring for kids to sit idle and chat for hours. But when my kids were presented with a new place and new kids to play with, I never observed them getting bored. 

With all the people I visited on this trip, I knew it would likely be my one chance a year to talk to them. That’s special enough for me. The idea that paying an entry fee to some special place is going to make it more special is not only absurd, it’s actually counterproductive because we end up spending a huge chunk of our time waiting in lines, stressing over limited food options for the kids, and navigating a range of preferences of what the different kids want to do next. Some of our best moments were when we visited another family’s house with nothing planned, and our kids would be enchanted with all of their kids’ toys (helping their kids see their “boring” toys with fresh eyes), and the adults would simply sit and connect. 

LESSON 4 – I CRAVE AND VALUE INTIMACY

Our trip got me thinking a lot about intimacy. I learned that intimacy is one of the things I crave the most in this life. I’m not talking about just physical intimacy but the entire wheel of intimacy that can be accessed in a relationship.

Whenever I muster the courage to lead a conversation or a moment in a more intimate direction, I always feel so alive, so fizzy and crackly, like the molecules in my body are like the fervent bubbles in a bottle of freshly-corked champagne. I look back on the moments where the courage wasn’t there, where I had the impulse to ask the delicate question, to say the hard thing, to lean in for a shoulder squeeze, but I lacked the bravery and skillfulness to turn the impulse into action. Those reflections are my teachers, they show me my growth edges, the areas where I want to improve, to build more skillfulness and comfort. 

Knowing that I’ll only get to see someone once per year, it changes the conversational calculus for me. I learned that I don’t want to talk about fantasy football, I don’t want to hear about your kid’s upcoming soccer schedule, and I most certainly don’t want to hear about how terrible the construction is on 494; I want to know what’s troubling you, what’s lighting your soul on fire, what you’re dreaming about. And the thing is, the time feels more precious because it’s limited, but actually I want to feel that preciousness all the time.  

Not all my friends and family are interested as being as intimate as I am. That’s ok. I don’t judge. We’re all at different parts of our journeys. It’s become clear to me, though, that the relationships I’ll continue to invest in are the ones where the other does want to go deep, does want to be vulnerable and take an intimacy risk, because those moments are life’s juiciest for me, and I want to cultivate as many of them as I can. 

EXCITEMENT IS ON THE HORIZON

Upon return to Costa Rica, I feel a palpable excitement about our second year here. We already have a completed house with no pending construction projects (other than some exterior landscaping/garden implementing). We already have a bit of a social network established. We know what school is going to be like. I can speak a little Spanish. I know where I can go to find good avocados, mouse traps, and the best karaoke singers in Guanacaste.

There aren’t nearly as many puzzles to figure out as when we moved here. Coming back from North America now feels a bit more like the dreamy turnkey experience we were hoping it would be when we moved. 

It now feels like nothing else is in the way of me pursuing my dreams and living in alignment with my values except me. What a sentence to write and believe.