The Long View: Why Some Journeys Take Years to Arrive

On staying with a life long enough to be changed by it—and trusting that meaning often arrives later than we expect.

As this year winds down, I keep finding myself thinking about the long view.

Not the tidy end-of-year kind—the lists, the launches, the measurable wins— but the slower kind.

The kind of work and living that only makes sense once you’ve stayed with it long enough to see what it’s been doing to you.

This time of year almost dares us to take inventory.

What did you finish?

What sold?

What grew?

What can you point to and say, See—this mattered?

But some things don’t move like that.

Some projects—and some lives—move at the pace of weather. Of seasons.

They ask for patience.

And a kind of faith that doesn’t come with applause.

I was reminded of that recently while reading a reflection on how long it can take for work to become relevant. Sometimes three years. Sometimes five. Sometimes longer.

That recognition landed in my body, not just my brain. It named the way I’ve been living—trusting the next step without quite seeing it yet.

It’s what you need when you’re planting trees whose shade you won’t sit in for a long time.

I stepped into that kind of faith back in 2011, when the story that would eventually become I Could Live Here: A Travel Memoir of Home and Belonging began—not as a book, but as a disruption.

The rented house my husband, Hank, and I were living in was suddenly sold. What began as a practical response—a plan for a year-long journey through four countries—quietly reshaped our lives.

One year became two.

Then five.

Then ten.

Now fourteen.

When the memoir was published in 2023, it didn’t feel like a beginning. It felt more like a pause—long enough to turn around and realize that something had been growing all along.

I knew the title long before anything else. Long before the book had a spine, it existed as small, ordinary acts of attention.

In a Portuguese town where we stayed for months, I began to notice when things stopped being explained to me.

The café owner assumed I knew where to stand, how to order, how long it was acceptable to linger.

My coffee appeared without ceremony.

That assumption, I realized, was its own kind of welcome.

Belonging often arrives not with attention, but with trust.

At the time, “anywhere living” was mostly framed as freedom—lightweight, aspirational, endlessly flexible.

The harder truths came later: the fatigue of constant recalibration, the loneliness that can arrive just as you’re finally learning the rules, the way real belonging is built not through motion but through repetition.

Still, I wrote anyway.

From quiet corners of borrowed homes, park benches, and libraries where time wasn’t measured in purchases.

From towns where recognition arrived quietly—through a corrected pronunciation, or the unspoken assumption that I would know how things were done by now.

The book entered the world softly.

No fanfare.

No fireworks.

That felt right.

It was never meant to be a flare.

It was meant to be a planting.

In the years since, the work itself has continued to change shape. I’m now deep inside a novel set in Portugal—another long-form act of attention, another commitment to staying with a place long enough to understand how history, ritual, and moral inheritance shape the lives lived within it.

It’s slower work.

Quieter.

Less easily summarized.

And this past year, the questions at the heart of I Could Live Here have surfaced again—this time through another transition.

After fourteen years of living this way, we found ourselves beginning again somewhere unfamiliar. Not as an experiment or an escape, but as a return to beginnerhood.

Experience, it turns out, doesn’t eliminate uncertainty.

It simply teaches you how to wait inside it.

How to listen longer.

How to trust that recognition—if it comes at all—will arrive quietly, in its own time.

Those familiar questions keep circling back.

Where do we belong in a world that keeps shifting?

What does stability look like when permanence feels increasingly theoretical?

How do we carry home with us—not as an identity, but as a practice?

These aren’t questions with viral answers.

They resist neat conclusions.

They ask for lived experience, not hot takes.

They reward a quieter kind of persistence: returning to the same commitments again and again. Listening longer than feels efficient. Staying past the moment of novelty. Allowing yourself to be changed by systems that weren’t designed for your convenience.

For me, I Could Live Here was never only about geography.

It was about attention.

About learning the cultural grammar of a place well enough to stop translating everything back to myself.

About resisting the urge to optimize every decision and instead asking what kind of life might grow from sustained care.

As the year turns, that’s the long view I’m holding onto—not as a strategy, but as a way of being.

Writing.

Traveling.

Living.

Trusting that some forms of arrival don’t announce themselves when they happen.

And if you’re tending something quietly right now—a project, a way of life, a question you keep returning to even when it would be easier to let it go—I hope you’ll keep going.

Some journeys only make sense after you’ve been on them for a long while.

And sometimes, you don’t realize what you’ve been planting until you look up, notice the season has changed, and find yourself standing in the shade.

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Thank you for reading.

This piece grew out of a year-end pause—one of those moments where looking back reveals patterns I couldn’t see while living forward. If you’re in the middle of something that doesn’t yet have a clear shape or outcome, I hope this offered a bit of company.

I’d love to hear what you’re tending right now, quietly or otherwise.

Comments are open below.