reEntry: engineering the end of an adventure and the beginning of becoming
E202: How do you come back down to Earth?
Every journey has an after
ReEntry
I wonder how an astronaut feels the day after s/he lands back on Earth.
What is going through her mind as her craft approaches reentry?
What does an Olympic athlete say to themselves when they reach the pinnacle of their sport and retire?
Before … there was the “mission”. Everything pointed to a process or an event, sometimes years in the making.
But now you are in the after.
Life is not as it was before.
It will never be the same.
How has this experience changed you?
Where has it left its mark?
What parts of you stayed the same?
How do you use this experience for other moments of reEntry?
The day after the wedding.
The day after you turn 40.
The day after you move out.
How do you now engage with life, knowing you are no longer the person from before?
What do you do when you come back to Earth?
How do you engineer the end of an adventure,
And the beginning of “becoming”?
What’s your most memorable reEntry story? Share yours in the comments.
What adventure changed you? Did you shed parts of your persona on the way to becoming someone new? How did you find your new normal? What lesson would you share with others?
Excuse me. I’m busy musing. This weekend marks twenty years since our epic around-the-world tour ended in July 2005, and I’m feeling nostalgic.
When we settled into a home in Canada, we plotted the places we’d visited on the giant vinyl map that took up a whole wall in my son’s bedroom. We thought we’d shown our family the ‘whole’ world. But surprise! It looked like Orion’s belt, hung diagonally and cinched across the globe. The map showed our children that, thankfully, there was still so much more to explore and discover.
3 kids (aged 4, 6 and 8 years old), 16 countries, 9 months, 4 suitcases & 4 carry-ons, 28 separate airline segments, 0 pieces of lost luggage, 35 hotels, over 31 beaches, stayed with 19 friends or relatives and visited over 35 more. We traveled by plane, train, automobile, subway/tube, campervan, buses, boats (ferries, speed boats, rice paddle boats), elephant, camel, donkey and a horse-drawn carriage. We experienced different cultures, languages & religions.
“Life is the journey - travel it well”
I’m finalizing a private Substack for our three children:
Importing 27 HTML blogs from Blogger that we posted from each stop along the way, each signed off with the message “Life is the journey - travel it well.” Before WhatsApp and Instagram, these were our “postcards” to friends and family across the globe who were waiting for us or tracking our progress. It was for our children’s schoolmates - a real-world Flat Stanley project! It was our way of signaling we were safe when the Tsunami hit on December 26, and the London tube bombings on 7/7.
Adding text or photos of the daily handwritten journal I kept for them, for us of this special time together.
Photos of ticket stubs and boarding passes. Receipts for Pokémon ice cream in Phuket, and bookmarks from the Polar Station, the Antarctic Centre in Christchurch, NZ - each a tiny visual trigger of a bigger experience that day.
Scouring our 7,683 photos and videos, adding visual memories of each day and stop along the way.
I have the 27 chapters we shared along the way. Twenty years on, my children are now adults. So I’m including ‘backstory’ mini-essays: how we made this decision, why and how we chose the destinations, our budget, and their learning curriculum. Details on how I came up with ‘No more than four’ as our rhythm for days of activity before a compulsory chill-day, after gauging their stamina through successive days of trekking across Manhattan. And ‘Dress them in Neon’ as my airport day hack after almost losing a child in Hong Kong airport. How I poured over travel books from the library to create an Excel sheet to track the temperature in each country, pulling together a rough itinerary so we could travel with just 4 suitcases, layering and shedding as we went along. How I developed 3 distinct themes (Friends & Family, Ancient Civilizations, Nature under threat) for our journey, so we could peg our memories back later when we reflected.
Then, tactical conversations on vaccinations and visas for such a varied set of climates and countries - the journey to becoming world citizens, one stamp at a time. How to pack so a family of five with all their luggage could fit into one Nepalese taxi.
This weekend is special. I recall contrasting feelings of dread and excitement. For the last stop on our journey, we based ourselves out of my family home in London - the place I grew up. After our return to the US, we would be driving to a new life in Canada.
After a year of living out of boxes and suitcases, life would restart - the simple act of routine.
You would think it would be easy to move from NYC to Toronto. But I still recall the cultural shift, particularly that first birthday party where I had to figure out where to shop for helium balloons, grab bags and number candles, and reorient myself to a new grocery store design, searching for the ingredients for the cake and the icing1.
Change is hard. Maybe that’s why I think about it so much.
Creating a shared language
In the days before laptops, our one family computer used to live in the kitchen. I programmed the dynamic screen saver to create a slide show from our photo gallery. [Are you old enough to remember Windows 7?] Each month I’d swap to a different stop on our journey, and often our dinner conversation would start with “Do you remember that day?” Sometimes the bigger lessons came from having the distance and space to reflect on our experiences in the quieter moments of our lives.
What I know is that our journey changed us profoundly - in subtle ways and big ways too. Now that my children live in three different cities, the Substack is our opportunity to keep the experience alive and continue that connection through shared language.
As I read ‘The Anxious Generation’ by Jon Haidt, and the conversation around community, I’m thankful that during that year - before smartphones and FB, apps and alerts made their appearance - we were able to maintain a community through our hardcoded blog, mesh with family and friends across five continents, develop a relationship with Mother Earth and those that live on it. And we, as parents, had the opportunity to give our children our undistracted attention.
Looking back, I now see that 2004-2005 was what I've come to call a "divergent year" - one of those rare periods when life accelerates and expands dramatically. I wrote about this concept in E81: Living Life Fast and Slow, exploring how some years are packed with transformation while others offer the quiet consolidation we need to process and integrate our experiences. Our world tour was definitely divergent. This Substack project and writing the book? This is convergent - the slow, reflective work of understanding what it all meant.
What’s Next
I have written one book referencing this journey. ‘Contours of Courageous Parenting - Tilting Towards Better Decisions’ was written at the height of the pandemic, pre-vaccines, when the world (and parents in particular) needed help making bold decisions. It is also a book about modelling decision-making as a muscle, so that our children learn to flex their ability to make and live with choices.
“Karena deSouza is a mom who is so fascinated by how raising kids actually works that she applied her considerable business and analytical skills and intellect to that task. She’s looked at raising kids as a business case with the fundamental question: How do we raise kids—pack them full of love and skills and empathy and tolerance—for a world that is unpredictable at a scale that is off the charts from any other generation?
We make CALCULATED decisions. She tells her readers how she learned to do that—and makes herself and her family and their adventure around the world the case study.
Contours of Courageous Parenting is a generous work by an author with a clear and earnest desire to be of service to others. It’s worth noting that deSouza is a much sought-after speaker on the future of work in the lives of young people, so clearly understands the impacts of parenting on kids’ lives. Although helpful for new parents, I think this book is particularly inspiring for mid-career parents—during those years when so few other parenting books are aimed at us”
- Review of the book from
. (Click here to buy the book on Amazon)
And because it launched a million other questions, I’m writing another. Twenty years later, I’m exploring the ripple effect and how the lessons we learned, the traditions we created, the patterns that we developed have led to how we lean into our continuing journey of ‘becoming’.
What do you want to see in this next book?
I’m meeting with some Tribe Tilt members to chat about the mechanics and reflections on this journey in particular, and ideas on how to parent in a Digital Age. If you’d like to join this AMA, DM me.
Related reads on convergent and divergent years:
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love
Karena
Something new happened this week:
inspired me to make my Bingo Card interactive! It is now easier to navigate my 200+ editions by topics that interest you.Click on the word BINGO to launch it
Would you like to join our Tribe Tilt?
Did you know I do keynotes, moderation and speeches? Here are some examples:
This article was inspired by
‘s inspiring post “On Becoming” where she talks about her annual ritual to build a birthday cake for her child. The process includes discovering what tastes and interests light up her children’s eyes.While the birthday cake triggered my reEntry memory, Abhilasha’s note showcases ‘undistracted attention’. Look at that cake!!! And enjoy the read!
Hi, Karena ~ I think we're just finishing (what will probably be) or most memorable reEntry story. After seven years in Europe, we've retired, moved back to the US, and built a house. Once a builder is finished with a house, there's still a surprisingly many things left to do (driveways, gutters, more flat work). We've been busy enough with that so that I don't think we've yet settled on our "new normal." Hopefully soon!
Such an inspiring story Karena. Love that you all have a private Substack to maintain your shared language!