A year is not a verdict. A life is not a ledger." After a season of choosing silence over output and listening over declaring, I am choosing to feel my way into this year rather than rush into it. I invite you to set down the pressure of resolutions and join me in asking a different set of questions about the layers we carry.

Where are you from?” is an impossibly small question for the life I have lived. I am stitched together by many homes, from my grandmother’s kitchen to the quiet rhythms of Botswana and the soft mornings of Costa Rica. If you really want to know me, don’t ask me where I’m from. Ask me where I’m local. Ask me where my soul softened and my masks fell away.

I never counted how many countries I’ve been to because you cannot count the places that have changed the shape of your heart. For women in midlife, travel is a way to answer the quiet hunger for something more. It reminds us that we are not too old to begin again and that adventure has no expiration date.