Work-Life Balance (Premium)

"I don't understand why you don't just live on a lake somewhere," my father once observed.

There's a lot more to that statement than is immediately obvious, but without getting into the differences between me and my father, let's just leave it at this: He was referring to the fact that my wife and I both work from home, and have for many years. (Decades, in my case.) Meaning, we could live anywhere.

Which is technically true. But only in isolation. We also have children, and they have lives, friends, activities, traditions and expectations, and other things that tie them to the place we do live. And we would never uproot our children for something so selfish. (And I have no desire to live on a lake, per se. The details don't matter.)

The thing is, I do occasionally wish I was somewhere else. And my wife and I do talk, fairly frequently, about what life might look like when the kids are grown up. That day is approaching---Mark is almost a year into college and Kelly is a high school freshman---but the future is unclear. I used to peg the year 2020 as some kind of transition point, a time when maybe we could consider moving. But that's when Kelly graduates from high school, so there's really another four years or more to go, as we want to make sure the kids have a home base during college at the very least. And once you get four or more years past that, the discussion gets more complicated, less real.

But we do what we can do. And for us, that has meant spending time in other places each year. We typically do a home swap each summer, almost always in Europe, and I have a vague goal of spending at least a month in Europe each year. This isn't as expensive as it maybe sounds, though of course airline tickets reached absurd levels in recent years before calming down again. But it's fair to say, too, that this isn't something many of my kids' friends' families do either.

Without getting too far into the decision-making process there, these trips have a few basic goals: To satisfy the need/want my wife and I have to travel and experience other cultures. And to imbue our children with a broader understanding of the world than we had as kids, to make them understand that diversity and differences are not just normal, but should be accepted and even celebrated. I don't care if they're ever grateful for these opportunities, per se. But I do care that they're not ignorant.

Put another way, these trips are about balance. If I don't travel enough, I start to get itchy. And if I travel too much, conversely, I get overwhelmed. The recent trip to Germany was perfect for me on a number of levels---I'd never been to Hanover or Berlin, for example---but it was even more necessary because I was on the brink of traveling to Africa a month earlier when Brad got sick and we had to cancel the trip. That created a weird, unfulfilled hole for me.

Looked at broadly, I think of any given year as a series of trips, and as the dead time between thos...

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