Kia Ora

Crossing Over

I know I’ve been quiet for a while, but today I have news to share.

As some of you already know, my family will be moving to New Zealand next week. My wife has accepted a teaching position at a primary school in Auckland, which has afforded our family residency visas. I am working with recruiters to explore job opportunities in consulting and transportation.

I’ve been reading The Wide Wide Sea, a book about Captain James Cook’s final voyage, which takes him to New Zealand, Tahiti, Hawaii, Vancouver, and Alaska in search of the Northwest Passage. Early in the journey, as the ship crosses the equator in the Atlantic, Cook, following tradition, insists that any sailor making the crossing for the first time be dunked into the ocean. It’s a strange and slightly absurd ritual—equal parts hazing and baptism—but it marks a threshold. Whatever lies ahead, they are no longer quite who they were before.

This will be a great adventure for our family, and I’m genuinely excited to explore all that Aotearoa has to offer—including jumping into the South Pacific at the first opportunity. At the same time, it is with real sorrow that we will be leaving behind family, friends, and a community that has been extraordinarily good to us over the past decades.

This Substack began back in June as a way for me to journal through my transition from nearly twenty years of federal service into a new phase of my career. At the time, New Zealand was little more than a glimmer on the horizon—a possibility, but a distant one. Since then, what began as a professional transition has been overtaken by a much larger one. My departure from federal employment has been subsumed by a departure from the United States itself.

Our reasons for leaving are multifaceted, and I’ve tried in various ways over the past few months to explain them to friends and loved ones. The simplest explanation may be that we were ready for change—and that we had a narrow window of opportunity to act on it. My wife and I were both Peace Corps volunteers, and over the years we often talked about living abroad again, perhaps at the end of our careers or in retirement. We never imagined that moment would come with me retiring at fifty.

In that sense, the proximate cause of this move was the 2024 presidential election. Had the outcome been different, we would not be leaving the country. That election did not dictate every step that followed, but it set in motion a sequence of decisions that ultimately led us here. What began as concern gradually became clarity. And clarity, once reached, is difficult to ignore.

That clarity is still difficult to accept, let alone express—but it has perhaps never been clearer than following the events of the past week.

Personally, the last few months have been dominated by the logistics of coordinating an international move across the world with a family of five and, increasingly, by goodbyes. I hope this Substack will evolve alongside that transition, while remaining what it was meant to be from the start: a place to reflect on leadership, politics, and the challenge of acting with integrity under uncertainty, especially as familiar structures fall away. I might even share some more playlists.

For now, I want to express my gratitude to all of you who have reached out over the past months to offer support, share concerns, or simply listen. It is perhaps only in leaving that we can fully appreciate all that we are leaving behind. Please know that we will be carrying you with us.

In this great future, you can’t forget your past.
— Bob Marley