Life between start and stop

These are the good years, I’ve written. These are the years we have with our health, with our children, with our friends even in short bursts. We are grown, we are working on being the people we meant to be, and we have, still, some time. It’s a beautiful phase, and it reminds me that things do not last.

Living abroad is a constant reminder. Much of our lives exists at the edges of systems, in the odd spaces between how things were meant to be used and how they work.

“We’re constant edge cases,” we tell each other. It’s our way of reminding one another how temporary things are. We say it when one of us is annoyed by something. We say it as we try to use banks from one country in another, as we VPN to our place of birth to update our drivers licenses, as we put Hong Kong phone numbers on our Japanese contact forms, as we file ever-more-complicated American taxes. Life like this is built on our willingness to work through things, to learn new cultures but also new types of paperwork, to learn how to file different forms and navigate bureaucracies. All of it is lucky, and all of it is temporary. Our skills age with us, reminders of change. We no longer need paper maps, though there is one on the wall in Tokyo. We no longer need to know how to rent pocket wifi, or where to buy SIMs on landing in Shanghai. We no longer need to know how to get ten year visas to China, or how to register for the electronic gates as a visitor to Hong Kong. Old pieces of knowledge float past us as we renew passports and move houses, the paper detritus reminding us of prior challenges, of small wins.

We say it too as a reminder of the kind of luck that we’ll one day tell of with laughter. We say it to remind ourselves not to be bitter when the rules change, when workarounds go away, when we have to pay full price again, or the staff turns over, or our favorite spots close. Our lives are built in the space between when things start working and when they stop, which makes it good to recognize and appreciate each moment. We remind ourselves that the gifts of security line and immigration shortcuts with a young child are temporary, and to cherish them. We appreciate getting in to climbing gyms with friends on off hours. Eventually, I’m sure, the rules will get more strict, and it will be a story we tell of things we used to be able to do. Everything ends, every ability is finite, every loophole eventually closes. Most restaurants will fade, even our favorites. Many shops we frequent will close when the owners retire. The gift, then, is to appreciate them for what they are, temporary and magnificent. Like carrying beers through security at Pudong airport in the early ’00’s, or like friends getting paid to do weddings in Shanghai as foreigners. Like climbing buildings in Harajuku late at night, long before there were too many tourists, too many cameras. Like watching three movies in a row after buying one ticket, or any of a million other stories of youth. Eventually all these things go away, and the lesson is not to mourn them but to be grateful that we lived in those moments, that we once found those freedoms.

The opposite side is the things that are new, the abilities we have now that we never had, and the challenges that have gone away. We can manage bank accounts in America now, because we can keep US cell phones functional abroad for reasonable cost. We can video call without going to net cafes. We can look up visa rules before going to the consulate. We can send people money in dozens of ways, and use ATM’s in foreign countries. No one ever has to buy money orders, has to carry traveler’s cheques, has to pay money changers.

Until we do, buying Indonesian rupiah in the ferry terminal in Singapore, paying over the margin to have cash for the visa on arrival, standing in the long lines because Indonesia doesn’t accept APEC cards, because we have not yet figured out a shortcut. And in that line I smile, aware that this is temporary, that this experience will be a story one day. I laugh because we are once again an edge case, out there between worlds, operating in a way our child will only learn of from our tellings.