I’m sitting in Kathmandu, Nepal, where I’ve spent the last three months tangled up in bureaucracy and history—organizing my work visa for Japan while watching a government fall and a revolution unfold. My original flight out with Cathay Pacific was cancelled in the upheaval, and now I’m set to board Air India instead. I’m not as confident about that, but maybe everything does happen for a reason.

It’s hard to sit still. I’m on pins and needles. Because this isn’t just another trip, it’s a return. In 2003, Tokyo was my first leap into living abroad. I landed in Ebisu, and in those sleepless nights I wandered the city lit like a dreamscape in neon, often at 4 a.m., with Jarren, a newfound lost soul. That moment in time was alive with possibility. Since then, I’ve lived in Kobe and Okinawa, and in over 40 other countries, and visited Tokyo a few times. But I haven’t lived there in 22 years.

Now I’m going back—not just to the city, but to teaching EFL again. To walk Tokyo’s streets knowing I once began there and now I’m circling back, older, sharper, carrying every country and classroom in between—it’s going to be mind-blowing.

From Kathmandu’s chaos to Tokyo’s neon, the return feels like destiny looping back on itself.

And maybe it’s simply ‘maktub,’ as Coelho wrote in The Alchemist—“it is written.” That first leap into Tokyo in 2003, the years spent in Kobe and Okinawa, and everywhere else, the detour through Kathmandu in the middle of a revolution, even a cancelled flight—each piece feels like it was always leading me back. Not chance, not coincidence, but a return that was already written into my story long before I could see the shape of it.

16sep2025