Decision Made

I am now moving forward with my journey to Saudi Arabia and KAUST.  After much discussion with my family, we've agreed it's the right decision.  Now I have to get final approval; medical, personal, etc..  If that all goes well, around the 1st week in January I'll be off on my new adventure.  It will be hard to concentrate on my current job in the meantime.  I have been advised not to give notice until I receive visa approval from SA so I have to buckle down for now.    I also have a ton of work to do to at home.  Just the contemplation of being gone has generated a todo list a mile long.  Fixing and painting and getting this done and contacting that person.....it's much easier to let things slide when there's always tomorrow or next week to fall back on. 

Let the journey begin.

Passages to be?

I've never "blogged" before and I'm trying it now, not to enlighten others, but to give myself a forum in which I can echo my thoughts back to myself. Initially this blog will likely be self-indulgent. So be it. As time passes I hope to provide more third party insight into events to come. For now, however....

It's beginning to look like my life is about to pass into a new phase. Well into my 5th decade of life, I've always joked that I "still don't know what I want to be when I grow up". Sad but true. I am on the brink of leaving a life spent in the good old USA "work-a-day" world for new and uncharted territories. KAUST (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology) is calling and I'm listening. Located on the eastern shores of the Red Sea, KAUST is "an international, graduate-level research university dedicated to inspiring a new age of scientific achievement in the Kingdom that will also benefit the region and the world. KAUST is the realization of a decades-long vision of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud." KAUST is in it's first year so I'd be joining on the ground floor working on staff in the IT department.

I would be leaving my family and all the security I've ever known to work in an unknown land. It's at once frightening and exhilerating! I've been pouring over the blogs of those who have made the leap already and none seem to regret it. My career in IT in the States has been successful but is becoming stultifying. I already spend most weeks several hundred miles from home for my current job......but this would be several thousand. Is personal growth and opportunity worth the sacrifice I'm asking of my family? I just don't know. I'm sure many would condemn such a move as perfidy of the highest order. I know that, today, I am not offering my family the best of me. I am lost in an urban wilderness with little direction and less joy in life. To take liberties with Shakespeare (he writes of death while I dream of life) I think he captures the nature of the conumdrum (and fear) I'm facing.

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

Change which impacts those we love is difficult enough when thrust upon us with no choice. At least then we can assuage our guilt with the knowledge that the decision was not ours to make. We move ahead making the best of whatever situation we encounter. Embracing change when not forced to is something else. Change that is a benefit for one may not be a benefit for all. It may (and is likely to) engender pain and sadness. The question becomes a quest for outcomes. Does the potential for long-term gain for everyone balance the (hopefully) short-term pain that will result? For better or for worse I am going to make this decision in the next week.