In 2009 I moved to the mountains of North Carolina to write a book. That started a sequence of events that led to me meeting Sara, and took us to California, Guatemala, China, Taiwan and Thailand. Sitting here 14 years later, editing the book that resulted from that journey, it's amazing how much I have learned.

We often make decisions with limited information, and sometimes that is a good thing, because if we knew what taking a particular path would entail, we might not start the journey. However, when we come out on the other side, everything looks different, and we can appreciate all of it, especially the difficulties.

As it turns out, my desire to write a book resulted in Sara writing about our journey. And now, over the holiday season, we are working on the final editing. Sara commented just today, after reflecting on something that happened in 2012, that she is just now ready to share our story. I feel the same. It has been a long time since we started this journey, but it's only now that we feel comforable with what will come next. And no matter how much we both, as introverts, would rather continue to live our simple and private lives, we will have to get comforable being a little more extroverted.

As I state in the Introduction, our story does not belong to us. And, sometimes whole lifetimes are lived so that one day, the lessons learned can benefit our future selves. It has often been said that we are eternal beings having a human experience, and that being the case, there is no hurry. All that matters is that eventually, when the time is right, we arrive at our destination.

And for myself and Sara, that time is just around the corner. It looks like 2024 is going to be an interesting year...