Do Your Best and Forget the Rest

My dad is usually a calming presence for me, but when he called yesterday to check on our relocation progress, he had quite the opposite effect. I was feeling pretty good about all we had accomplished in the past 5 weeks until he started asking questions. Questions like: Have you put your house on the market yet? Nope. Have you sold your cars? Nope. Have you planned your pre-assignment visit? Nope. Do you realize that May 1st is less than 3 weeks away? Not really…

So many of the big ticket items on our relocation to-do list can’t happen until we receive visa approval. As the days go by with no visa, this is pushing us up closer and closer against our move date. A little too close for comfort if you ask me. There is no realistic way that we can accomplish everything that’s left within a two week time span, especially since shipping the dogs will be such a huge priority in our last week. And I can’t even really move forward with those plans until we have a firm move date in place.

It’s weird because I know we could receive our visa approval at any moment. The embassy will send us a confirmation email and a notification that our passports are in transit back to us. An email. That's seriously the gunshot we're waiting for to start this relocation race. Needless to say, I've been obsessively checking it all day, every day. 

The most we can do until then is to be prepared. No, we don’t have our house on the market, but it’s ready to go with a moment’s notice. No we haven’t sold our cars, but we have a plan for who to sell them to when the time comes. We may not have a house hunting trip planned, but we know which neighborhoods we want to focus on when we do. I feel like that’s the best we can do at this point.

Patience is a key requirement in getting through an international move. You have to have the ability to take a step back and realize that everything is going to fall into place. Everything is eventually going to get done. Until then, as Tony Horton would say, “Do your best, and forget the rest.”  Oh Tony, the great philosopher.