Running Toward the Dream

If you had asked me what my dream was when I was eleven years old, I would have told you without hesitation: to live internationally.

So here is the news that some of you, my current and recent clients, have already caught wind of, and many of you have not. This July, my family is moving to Bali.

Let’s get the short answers to the most common questions out of the way (you guess the question):

• Years is the plan.

• Yes, we’ll be working and running our businesses from there.

• I wrote a different post on why our family chose Bali specifically.

• English is widely spoken.

• Yes, we will miss them dearly.

• Surprisingly great international schools.

Now that those are out of the way, let’s go deeper.

Saying “we’re moving to Bali” still feels a little surreal, especially as we are in heavy logistics mode at the moment. But the truth is that this isn't a sudden turn or a midlife impulse (though I understand if it looks like one from the outside). It's the slow unfolding of something I've carried since I was a boy, and as a family we’ve been visioning for years.

This post is about following my dream, and my hope is it inspires you to follow your dream.  

A Dream Planted Early

"Don't worry it won't bite... it will just squeeze you to death and eat you whole"

I lived overseas as a kid, in five different countries, with four different local religions, and with very different cultures. Even before conscious memory, those experiences were implanting seeds. From what I do remember (from about seven to eleven), I loved it for some of the following reasons:

• Adventure - family offroading desert races or caravan treks through the dry river beds. 

• Community - tight expat communities with beach BBQs every Friday where the parents would grill and drink, and the kids would run around like maniacs. 

• Beauty - in the Himalayas of Kashmir and gold of Egyptian markets. 

• Diversity - every shade of skin, every kind of God, and every spice imaginable (oh, the smells of spice markets!). 

• Contrasts - think the poverty of India versus the oil riches of Dubai (police cars were Mercedes and Lamborghinis when I lived there). 

Yes, there were inconveniences, like waiting for hours in an airport with no air conditioning in middle-of-nowhere India during summer. At that same airport my mom was hauled away by the police for punching a vendor who kept offering her hot coffee when all she wanted was cold water. Dad left me with strangers so he could go help. Thankfully, they released her after she apologized to said vendor, and I was reunited with my parents. We still laugh at this family moment.

But that was all part of the adventure.

I loved it so much that it was incredibly hard to move to the muted suburbs of Houston at eleven and go to school with kids who mostly hadn’t seen anything beyond Texas. Where the food choices were Sonic and Chili’s. Where there was only one type of language and religion. The culture shock was so intense I developed tics. 

That early worldly exposure rewired something in me. It taught me that there are many ways to live, eat, believe, and work. The way we live is a choice, not a default. There is profound freedom in remembering we can choose a different path.

I always wanted to live internationally again.

I got my chance at twenty-five, when I chose a job out of college that took me to a construction camp in Far East Russia. Let me just say it was technically living overseas, but it was not exactly the vision my eleven-year-old self had in mind (picture less "eat, pray, love" and more "mud, diesel, frostbite" while sleeping in a converted shipping container). 

I won a case of Blue Diamond almonds thanks to this photo

In my adult years, I continued to travel - fifty countries and counting - and that mostly scratched the itch. I created lifestyle businesses that allowed me to work from anywhere and travel at least two months a year. The dream went quiet for decades, the way dreams do when work and marriage (and failure and divorce) take over… but it was always there, waiting.

As years went on, I watched a friend of a friend pull his four kids out of school and go live in Italy for a year. I witnessed another dad take his family and two young kids on a round-the-world trip for a year. Wow! That’s who I want to be when I grow up!

The Vision Takes Shape

Years later, when I met my wife Sophia, I shared my childhood dream with her. And lo and behold, she had the same dream. The plan we created went something like this:

Step 1) Have kids. 

Step 2) Laugh and dance.

Step 3) Save money.

Step 4) Maintain our health.

Step 5) Live overseas while our kids are young. 

Step 6) Figure the rest out.

For the first few years while we started a family, from time to time we would talk about where we might live in this new adventure. We were sure it would be Latin America given our travel-Spanish, our oldest being in a Spanish immersion preschool, a similar time zone that made it easy on businesses, and that we'd be a manageable flight from elderly parents. On paper, it made all the sense in the world.

Each year we’d spend a week or two in a new Latin American country, to try it on for size. After vacationing in Mexico many times, visiting friends in Costa Rica, touring Colombia, we still couldn’t find OUR place. We found great vacation spots, but not somewhere that we’d want to live and raise our kids.

Somehow he was able to sleep in a tuk-tuk

In all honesty, it wasn’t just that we hadn’t found a location, but it was also about timing. My Mother had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and we wanted to spend the final years with her while she was still… my Mom. 

Then, when we took a sabbatical in 2024, we decided to spend six weeks in Bali (thanks to our sabbatical coach Lyndall for helping us narrow down our list!). Bali was the other side of the world, so we figured we wouldn’t have many chances to travel to a place that far away.

Plans have a way of dissolving when your heart gets a vote. We fell in love with Bali. With the family-friendly culture, the kind people, the unhurried lifestyle, the natural beauty that seems to insist you slow down and notice it. We didn't just like Bali. We found our home there. By the time we left, the question had quietly shifted from should we? to how soon?  (I wrote another post with more about why Bali is the most family friendly-place.) 

Here's the part that still amazes me: the decision was quick and natural, made in week one of a six-week sabbatical. (We had five more weeks to second-guess ourselves and somehow never did. Instead we started looking at schools.)

What I'm Really Moving Toward

If I'm honest about why this matters so much to me, it goes deeper than scenery.

I want to spend more of my life being and less of it doing. I want to spend far less of my time in cars (a goal my physical therapist fully endorses) and more time with friends. I want to slow down. To create more and consume less. And most of all, I want to develop a deeper connection to God and to the sacred experience of being human, to reconnect with deeper spiritual practices that have been hard to keep up between work and family life in the US.

On our sabbatical in Bali, I had two of the most powerful meditations I'd experienced since having kids - one about my purpose, and another that became a daily affirmation. Those meditations weren’t deep because I was trying harder, but because the environment was supportive of deeper awakening, a different way of being. (Shout out to Pyramids of Chi!) I want to live closer to that way of being.

How Are We Feeling?

People keep asking us this question. The honest answer is: so many feels. Excited, sad, grateful, scared, hopeful, guilty.

Mostly we're excited. But there's real sadness woven through it too, and most of that is about the people we're leaving. My parents are in their 80s and my mom’s Alzheimer’s has progressed significantly. Thankfully Dad has lots of family, friends, and help. My dad has been extraordinary about it. Supportive, understanding, and (of course) sad to watch his son and grandsons move so far away.

He, of all people, understands. Fifty years ago he did the very same thing to follow his dream of living internationally, leaving his own mother and siblings to move across the world. He moved the week of his father's funeral. So when he tells me he gets it, I believe him.

Dad's message after we told him the news

This isn't a permanent goodbye, though. We'll be back in the US at least once a year. We still have roots that aren't going anywhere, and a return ticket that's part of the plan, not a contingency.

Running Toward, Not Away

When I share this, some people say “It’s a great time to leave the country.” In their mind we’re running away. Away from U.S. politics, consumer culture, school shootings, the cost of dining out with a family, homelessness, [insert your complaint here]. 

I'll be candid. We are not running away from anything. We are running toward something: a lifelong dream, a vision we built together, a place we love. I see leaving the issues as a bonus, but they are not the main feature. 

I know the difference firsthand, because I've done both. Years ago I left Austin to escape it, then came back. I can tell you this move feels nothing like that one. I also learned the hard way: your problems can follow you across any border. Geography is not therapy. You cannot outrun what is calling to be healed.

And yet, our environment shapes us. The two truths sit side by side. We are not the same person rushing through Friday afternoon traffic that we are on a quiet morning walk by the rice fields. Real change is iterative: we work on ourselves and we choose surroundings (places and people) that make the work more possible. Inner growth and outer environment aren't rivals. They're partners.

That's what I'm carrying into this move. Not running from my life, but reshaping the soil my family grows in.PS: Bali isn’t perfect. Then again, nowhere is. We choose what we can (or will) live with.

A Sign

I’m a huge fan of The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho. One of my biggest takeaways from rereading that book half a dozen times: pay attention to signs. I’ve made it a practice to pay attention to signs, and one just happened on Father's Day that felt like a giant Las Vegas neon sign, a confirmation of this decision to move to Bali.

For Father’s Day, my dad handed me a small gift bag. When I opened it, I pulled out a stack of old photographs from 1981 and 1982. These were pictures of me as a baby and toddler, on trips our family took while we were living in Singapore. Written on the back, in my Mom’s handwriting, were the words “Hotel pool in Bali - Feb 1981.” 

I've been here before

I had no memory of those trips, and had never seen these photos. I'd been making this enormous decision, with no idea that the island had held me as a baby and toddler, much like it’s going to hold my one year-old son.

I don't fully know how to explain that. Call it coincidence if you like. I've come to feel it as something closer to destiny, or God's calling. A thread that was woven into my life long before I was conscious enough to grasp it, finally pulling taut.

A coach and spiritual mentor of mine recently told me that we know we’re on God’s path when we find a choice that’s inconvenient, and in spite of the inconvenience, choose to do it anyway. 

That is Bali for me, for us. A move that will take us to the other side of the world, far from elderly parents, and require us to change our businesses and lives. And we still choose to do it.

With love and anticipation,

Bryan

Afterword

I'm writing this because 1) it’s fun to share the fulfillment of a lifelong dream with you, and 2) I genuinely hope it inspires you, much like the fathers that inspired me. 

The eleven-year-old me (or you) was onto something. It just took me the rest of my life so far to honor him.

I invite you to take ten minutes and think about what dreams you have, whether from childhood or last night, that you’ve been putting off until the right moment to take action. There is no right moment, there is only now.  

What did you want, before the world told you to be reasonable? 

What's the dream you've shrunk to fit your calendar?

I don't think we're meant to abandon those dreams. I think we're meant to grow into them. This July, mine is finally taking root halfway around the world, and I'll be writing to you from there.