One of the things I’ve wanted to capture in this blog is personal experience. For me, this has been a way of savoring the moments, and lingering in them far beyond their original scope. In this regard, I am reminded of that excellent Richard Curtis movie About Time, which teaches us that love, joy and fulfillment are not gifts that are simply granted to us, but something we must create with intention in every moment of our lives. It is this idea of intentionality that I would like to discuss today.
Earlier this year, Anu and I made an intentional decision to move to the city of Austin in Texas. While we continue to love the Pacific Northwest and Bellevue, Washington in particular, we figured it was time to shuffle things up, having lived in the same place for over a decade (over 17 years for me). It wasn’t really a straight-line decision, much more of an exploratory one where we decided each step on its own merits and landed where we did. Some ideas were set in motion around April of 2026, we made the decision to move around mid-May, and we finally did in mid-August. It is a curious fact that when you lean into change and go with it, you don’t notice it all that much. Everything is different in Austin, of course, but in many other ways, everything is still pretty much the same. Personally, I have committed to travel back to Washington every few weeks to stay connected with the team at work.
What’s been interesting to me in this entire (albeit still short) journey is the commentary and questions from the people I know. First, more than one person has characterized it as a Big Move, and second, we’re asked why. Now this may seem like a natural question, but the answer has struck me as post hoc rationalization — we decided to move, that’s all, the rest is a story we make up. For some people, the idea of picking up and moving somewhere else seems like a scary thing and perhaps it truly is, and we just didn’t notice it. For me personally, this was no different than many of my earlier moves from one apartment to another, or one house to another (I reckon I’ve lived in 5 apartments and 3 houses in Seattle / Bellevue). Our main additional complications were the interstate transport of our stuff and the comfort of our cats. Hobbes and Susie travelled with us in the cabin of the plane, and they clearly did not enjoy their moments on the flight. Hobbes in particular had had enough of the descent in the first 5 seconds. But no matter — we made it to the house, and we made it our home.
What is intentionality without clarity of purpose, you may ask. I am a strong believer in the idea that we have to define our own purpose and substantiate it with the right goals, and moreover, how we get somewhere matters far more than where we get to. After all, if the moments are all we have, what does it matter what the destination is? All we have is today, this hour, this minute, this instant — like the derivative in calculus, just because you take the limit to zero doesn’t mean the slope ceases to exist — the trajectory is all that matters, and we must learn to seize the moment and soar.
My library has travelled with me to Austin, and I hope to get serious about reading my books.