One Story

She sat down near me at a bus terminal in Latvia, took a breath, and opened her travel bag. She went through her papers for a minute or so, pulled out a single sheet, and read it over.

I kept looking at her. I wondered if she was lost, or unsure of the bus schedules, and whether I should offer to help. She caught me at it, turned, and smiled.

“My husband died recently,” she said. “He always took care of these details, and this is something I’m learning how to do. I’m traveling more because it takes my mind off of things. And sometimes I need just an extra minute to gain the confidence to go talk to the person in charge.”

She was on her way to a volunteer project about three hours away, working with children. They would remind her of her own grandchildren, she said, and she wanted those grandchildren to see her still building a life.

Then she read the sheet once more, stood up, and walked to the person in charge. She took her time getting there.

I had been ready to rescue her. As it turned out, all she needed was two minutes and a piece of paper.

One Step

Somebody else used to handle it. The tickets, the forms, the talking at the counter. Then a death, a divorce, or a move leaves the job with you.

Build the pause into the plan. Before any counter, whether it is a bus terminal, a bank, or a visa office, put what you need on one sheet of paper: where you are going, what you are asking for, the one question you cannot leave without answering. Arrive ten minutes early. Sit down. Read the sheet. Then stand up and go.

Nobody behind the counter knows how long you sat.

One Question

What would you walk toward today if you gave yourself two minutes to gather your courage first?

— Randy

I've spent fifty years in international education and cultural exchange — a front-row seat to people changing careers, countries, and lives. If you're putting together a panel, a podcast, or a story and want a voice from the field, just reply. Replies come straight to me, and I read every one.

One Story

What do you do when you lose your job, your fiancé, and your dog all in the same month? Well, you could write a country and western song. Or, you could tally up what all this took, and see if you have anything left to give. That’s what one of our volunteers from the Netherlands did. He had more in the tank and was ready to share it anywhere but the Netherlands. He needed a seat on a plane and a place to go where he was needed. After I spoke with him a couple of times, it was clear he needed a sense of purpose, a quiet project to work on, to regain his confidence, and to jump back into real life in the Netherlands.

I went to a good friend of mine in South Africa, who worked with injured animals. They, too, he told me, still had much to give and needed some tender, loving care. So we sent our Dutch volunteer to South Africa for a month. The project had a female lion who had been injured. She needed the same face each day and a gentle walk to strengthen a weak hip. And so twice each day, our volunteer walked his new charge down dirt roads in silence. It was hot and quiet, and as it turns out, healing for both.

The photo at the top of this post is our volunteer. I had the photo enlarged into a poster for our office. During a staff meeting, I told “their” story so each member of the team would see the poster and be reminded that we can always find a place to give more than we think we have. And in my 50+ years, I’ve learned that even more comes right back atcha. The best way to receive is to give.

One Step

Do the tally on paper. Draw two columns. On the left, write what the last year took from you. On the right, write what you still have: your hands, your hours, your patience. Then pick one thing from the right column and place it wherever it needs the same face again and again. That could be a dog walk at the shelter, a reading hour at the library, or a morning in a community garden. Every town on the map has one of these. Keep it quiet and keep it small. Confidence comes back in repetitions. Big decisions can wait.

One Question

When you tally what this year has taken, what small thing is still in your tank that you’ve been saving for a better day?

— Randy

I’ve spent fifty years in international education and cultural exchange. It’s a front-row seat to people changing careers, countries, and lives. If you’re putting together a panel, a podcast, or a story and want a voice from the field, just reply. Replies come straight to me, and I read every one.

One Story

She went to Peru to help on a playground, not to teach. Second year of university behind her, from a family of teachers, feeling like she owed the profession a try before she picked something else. Two months to sort what came next. Family therapy, counseling, coaching, teaching. She put all four ideas about her future on her volunteer application.

The kids on that playground had almost nothing. She hadn’t expected how much of her attention they’d take, or how little she’d want it back.

One hot afternoon a ball came off a child’s foot and somebody yelled “¡Cuidado!” She turned her head half a second too late. Left eye, full contact. A shiner visible throughout the entire playground.

Our partner in Peru sent us a photo to explain what happened. We texted our volunteer. “No big deal, I’m ok,” was the reply. Except that my telephone was ringing. Someone sent the exact same image to her mom.

I was at lunch waiting on my usual Friday lobster roll. Mom got patched through to my cell, and I spent the next twenty minutes explaining a black eye while the roll went cold on the table.

Later we laughed about it. Back then? Not funny.

Oh yeah. Those four boxes I mentioned above? She’s a pediatrician.

One Step

Write down the thing you think you're supposed to do. Then go do something close to it, somewhere the stakes are real, and watch what actually holds your attention when nobody's grading you on it. She checked four boxes: family therapy, counseling, coaching, teaching. Pediatrics wasn't one of them. It showed up on a playground in Peru, in the kids who had almost nothing and needed her anyway.

You don't find the fifth box by thinking harder about the first four. You find it by standing somewhere new and noticing what you can't stop watching.

One Question

What are you doing right now because you think you should, and what would you notice about yourself if you did it somewhere the need was real instead of theoretical?

— Randy

I’ve spent fifty years in international education and cultural exchange — a front-row seat to people changing careers, countries, and lives. If you’re putting together a panel, a podcast, or a story and want a voice from the field, just reply. Replies come straight to me, and I read every one.

One Story

[My Substack (The Crossing) publishes every Friday, without fail. I chose to publish this post on Saturday instead. I didn’t want to publish anything on 9/11. That’s a day that hopefully people use for reflection.]

For over fifty years, my work has sent other people across borders. Now and then, it has meant crossing a few myself. Some at exactly the wrong moment.

In December 2010, I was in Amman, where I had just put together a teaching program. Then it was off to Damascus to set up a volunteer project for English tutors, to tutor English in a refugee camp. (Later, after I got back home, I would learn that I was there just a few weeks before Syria came apart.) The work in Damascus was ordinary. The timing was not. As we got close to the city, my driver pulled over. A Western face in the passenger seat, he said, was an invitation for trouble. The safest place for me, until we reached our hotel, was the trunk.

So I rode into Damascus folded up in the dark, bumping along and listening to a city I couldn't see. We arrived. The work got done. I flew home to a family who had no idea what I’d been up to. And to our first-ever family Christmas tree.

People picture the person who builds these programs behind a desk, staring at a wall of clocks, sorting through a stack of flight schedules. The desk exists. So does the trunk. You cannot spend fifty years helping people cross into the world without sometimes the world reaching back.

One Step

Fear and risk are very personal feelings. For almost everything in life, waiting for fear to disappear before you say yes will almost always limit your choices and experiences. The fear just won't disappear. But you have the power to change it into a shape you feel comfortable with. Something you can work with. Damascus was a functioning destination two weeks before it wasn't. I’m thinking that most of what you're weighing next is nowhere near that edge. When your fear or risk involves travel, read travel advisories carefully. The US State Department and the UK FCDO both rate by level and by region, so a Level 4 province inside a Level 2 country is common. Read and focus on the reasons, not the color. And then, check again the week you go. It really is just like crossing the road. Just before you step, look both ways.

One Question

Is it the risk you're afraid of, or the not knowing when it stops being one?

— Randy

I’ve spent fifty years in international education and cultural exchange — a front-row seat to people changing careers, countries, and lives. If you’re putting together a panel, a podcast, or a story and want a voice from the field, just reply. Replies come straight to me, and I read every one.

One Story

She’d been at her project in northern Thailand for less than a week when she counted the footballs: five, all flat, kicked across a stone playground until even the fluff gave up. A wiry little thing, football-mad since she was small, and this was the first thing that stopped her in her tracks.

On her next day off, she hitched a ride into the nearest city, bought a ball, and hitched back before dark. That is not something I would have approved of at all. She did it anyway.

The kids at her project didn’t wait for her to unpack. Ball out of the bag, straight onto the stone, screaming at every kick that actually rolled where it was aimed.

She called a community center back home in the UK. Two weeks later, two more balls arrived. When she got home, she set up a small charity to raise funds to send footballs to the projects in northern Thailand she had come into contact with. Her goal was to send 50. Two years in, she’d sent 113.

The charity doesn’t exist anymore. She finished uni. Became a teacher. Got married. Started a family.

One Step

Wherever you land — a school in northern Thailand, a clinic in rural Kenya, a homestay in provincial Argentina — give yourself two weeks before you try to fix anything. Not because you shouldn't act. Because what you’ll end up fixing is rarely the thing you notice on day one. Spend those two weeks counting instead: what's broken, what's missing, what people ask for twice. Somewhere in that list is a five-football problem — small, obvious once you see it, and entirely within your reach to solve before you’re finished. It’s a great opportunity to “leave it better than you found it.”

One Question

How long have you been counting the same five footballs?

— Randy

I’ve spent fifty years in international education and cultural exchange — a front-row seat to people changing careers, countries, and lives. If you’re putting together a panel, a podcast, or a story and want a voice from the field, just reply. Replies come straight to me, and I read every one.

One Story

One of the first programs I built sent volunteers abroad to practice English with anyone who wanted it. Students, mostly. We called it Conversation Partner.

One of ours landed at a well-known university, and the administration rushed her into a dorm wing already closed for repairs and gave her meals in a different corner of the dining hall than everyone else. A few days in, I made the check-in call we always made, and when she told me what was happening, I told her I was canceling the program and bringing her home.

She said no.

She’d dealt with this her whole life because of the color of her skin, and she knew exactly what the university had done. She wasn’t there to be the story. She was there to teach English, and a closed dorm wing wasn’t going to be the reason she left before she was ready. So she kept showing up to that cafeteria table, kept explaining verb tenses over lunch, kept saying yes to the weekend nobody expected her to say yes to.

She came home smiling. None of what she carried should have been hers to carry.

One Step

When a placement goes wrong, like a bad landlord, a hostile office, or a housing assignment that never should have happened, the question isn't whether you can tough it out. It's whether staying still gets you what you came for. If it does, stay on your own terms. If it doesn't, leave. Let that be the end of it, not a referendum on your character.

One Question

When something happens to you that shouldn't have, who gets to decide what happens next? The person who caused it, or you?

— Randy

I’ve spent fifty years in international education and cultural exchange — a front-row seat to people changing careers, countries, and lives. If you’re putting together a panel, a podcast, or a story and want a voice from the field, just reply. Replies come straight to me, and I read every one.

One Story • One Step • One Question. Three minutes.

One Story

Somewhere in a city I no longer live in, on a floor I no longer walk across, there’s a cactus. It’s tall, and thin, and it stands alone in a square of afternoon light with nothing around it — no other plants, no furniture, nothing to make it look less exposed.

I left it behind when I moved to the UK years ago, and I still don’t fully know why this photo gets me the way it does. This is the last photo I took, moments before walking out the door, heading to JFK to wing my way to the UK for years. Sometimes I stare at this photo and wonder what possessed me to capture this on my way out.

Sometimes it seems more like a self-portrait. The feeling of aloneness, hoping someone will come by and water me. Prickly on the outside. Growing as straight and tall as it can manage, with nobody watching. Easy to walk past in a crowded shop, easy to overlook, and still somehow standing at the end of the day.

Is it just a plant I hoped my landlord would take in and water? Or is it a reminder of what I left behind? Or a photo of my future? In the end, it’s just a cactus I had for two decades — and I left it alone in that room. I sometimes wonder what that says about me.

Years later, I can say with outright authority: that’s most of what living abroad actually asks of you. Not the big, brave leap everyone congratulates you for on the day you leave. The quieter thing after — showing up straight and tall in a place where nobody yet knows your name, thirsty for something familiar, and staying upright anyway.

A cactus can stand alone in an empty room. It can also stand shoulder to shoulder with a hundred others in a greenhouse and never once stop being exactly what it is.

I still don’t know which photograph it was. But I know what it taught me about the years since — and it’s not the lesson about the leap. It’s the one about what comes after.

One Step

I didn't find my footing here through one big decision. I found it the way that cactus might have — one small return at a time. If you're starting over somewhere new, pick one recurring thing and stick with it; don't switch to a different one each week. A Tuesday running club, a language exchange, a Saturday market stall. A coworking space in Bangkok, an allotment in Bristol, a Toronto ESL meetup — the where doesn't matter. What builds a greenhouse is showing up to the same room twice.

One Question

If someone caught you on camera on your way out the door tomorrow, what would the photo show you still hoping somebody would water?

— Randy

I’ve spent fifty years in international education and cultural exchange — a front-row seat to people changing careers, countries, and lives. If you’re putting together a panel, a podcast, or a story and want a voice from the field, just reply. Replies come straight to me, and I read every one.

One Story

Years ago, when I lived in London the first time, I worked with a woman who, at fifty-six, had left her big house in Australia. She had four grown children and a husband she still loved. And still, she moved to London alone. She told him six months, maybe a year. What followed instead was house shares, uncertain jobs, and stretches of unemployment. Then, at sixty, her first full-time career: registrar at a university in Richmond Upon Thames. Her marriage didn’t end; she and her husband met for holidays in places halfway between their two lives.

What I remember most is how she described sitting in her tiny flat after work, quietly delighted, because she had bought her own groceries and paid the bill herself. “It was my turn,” she said.

Some crossings aren’t away from anyone. They’re toward the part of you that’s been waiting.

One Step

Back in the day, she found her way into London — but the door she used then has narrowed, and it's worth knowing exactly what today looks like. The UK, unlike much of Europe, has no digital nomad visa. A visitor can stay up to six months, and working remotely for an overseas employer is tolerated only as incidental to the visit — the moment it becomes your main reason for being here, you're on the wrong side of the rules. The practical read: the UK is a place to test a life for a few months, not to quietly live one on visitor status. Testing is legal. Pretending is not. Look closely before you leap.

One Question

Her words are worth considering. What have you been quietly putting off until you perceive it's your turn? And who, honestly, is in charge of deciding when that is?

— Randy

I’ve spent fifty years in international education and cultural exchange — a front-row seat to people changing careers, countries, and lives. If you’re putting together a panel, a podcast, or a story and want a voice from the field, just reply. Replies come straight to me, and I read every one.

One Story

She was in her twenties and had never left her home state when she decided to teach English in Thailand. She expected — reasonably — to be held by a kind of safety net: fellow teachers, school leaders, a community that badly wanted a native English speaker for its children.

Then one afternoon, riding her bicycle on a busy road, a van crowded her deliberately off the edge. She went down a ravine with the bike and lay there unconscious. A family walking a footpath into town found her, tangled in the undergrowth — alive, alert, unable to manage alone — and flagged down help from the road.

Within days, she was back at school. Her family urged her to come home. The school offered to release her from her contract. She refused. She had come to be of service — in Thailand, a child who truly learns English can change a family’s direction for a generation — and she would not let one driver rewrite her reason for being there. Her headmaster told us that her smile afterward was the same one as before. She finished her contract on the last day and only then flew home.

I keep a photograph of her. When I see it, I remember that the world is in better hands than the news would have you believe.

One Step

Her safety net worked — a family, a school, a program. Build yours before you need it. Three unglamorous moves: carry travel medical insurance that explicitly covers hospitalization and emergency evacuation (they are separate line items — check both); register your trip with your own government so someone official knows where you are (Americans use the State Department's free STEP, Australians Smartraveller, Canadians the Registration of Canadians Abroad, New Zealanders SafeTravel, and Britons should at minimum subscribe to FCDO alerts for the country); and on day one, put the local emergency number and your program's emergency contact in your phone and on paper in your wallet. She was helped by strangers within hours. The paperwork is for the day the strangers don't come.

One Question

If your crossing hit its worst day, what would decide whether you stayed — the fear of that moment, or the reason you came? It's worth knowing your reason well enough to answer before anything tests it.

— Randy

I’ve spent fifty years in international education and cultural exchange — a front-row seat to people changing careers, countries, and lives. If you’re putting together a panel, a podcast, or a story and want a voice from the field, just reply. Replies come straight to me, and I read every one.

One Story

My barber, who I've had for the last four years, was sixty when he left a secure marketing job to learn to cut hair. He had never cut another person’s hair in his life. Most of the students on his training course were sixteen, and he knew exactly what they saw when he walked in: the old man in the room.

The conversation he feared most was with his father — a former fishmonger and factory worker who had preached safety his whole life, who believed you never leave one job without another. He braced for the objection. Instead, his father said: “That’s fantastic. Life’s so short.” He nearly cried when he told me.

He cuts as many as seventeen heads a day now, and still sweeps his own floor.

Fifty years of watching people change direction has taught me that the permission we’re waiting for often arrives after we’ve already begun.

One Step

If you're contemplating a change late — a new trade at sixty, a move at fifty-five — the number that decides it is rarely the salary. It's the gap: how many months you'll earn less while you learn, and what covers you if something goes wrong in that window. Write down two figures before anything else: the monthly shortfall and the number of months. Almost nobody does this, and almost everybody who abandons a late change abandons it in month four of a gap they never sized. Whatever your country's safety net looks like, find its edges before you're standing on them.

One Question

Whose permission are you still waiting for — and what does it tell you that the barber's father said yes only after he'd enrolled?

— Randy

I’ve spent fifty years in international education and cultural exchange — a front-row seat to people changing careers, countries, and lives. If you’re putting together a panel, a podcast, or a story and want a voice from the field, just reply. Replies come straight to me, and I read every one.

One Story

She was in her early thirties when she came to me about teaching English in Spain. She didn’t have close to the money. She’d been deciding for two years. I thought she was looking for validation that moving abroad and teaching were not right for her.

That wasn’t the validation I gave her. She gave away almost everything she owned and went to Spain — leaving behind a job that had stopped going anywhere and a heaviness she was hoping a new country might lift.

Spain delivered. Cheaper bills, better food, and the small daily victory of teaching, and of holding her own in the staff room, in a language she was still learning. When we checked in on her at five months, she told us the anxiety had eased. The heaviness had come along in the luggage. She’d go out with friends, have a good night, and then not leave her apartment for two days.

Here’s the part I’ve never forgotten. She didn’t book a flight home, nor a teaching job in yet another new country. She finally realized she’d been running the same experiment her whole adult life — new city, new job, new start — and Spain was the first place far enough away for her to see the pattern. So she cut her hours at school, kept asking for help, and started building a week that left room for the bad days instead of pretending they wouldn’t come.

She met someone a teacher colleague introduced her to. They married; she became a mother. She’s still in Spain — which is the part that matters, because for the first time, she stayed.

Fifty years of watching people cross borders have taught me that a new country changes the scenery. It cannot unpack your suitcase for you.

One Step

If any part of your well-being runs on prescriptions or a therapist, that care does not automatically cross borders with you. Medication routines at home can be restricted or outright illegal at your destination — this catches Americans, Britons, Australians, and Canadians equally, and the rules are set by where you're going, not where you're from. Your therapist generally can't treat you across international lines, and insurance rarely follows. None of this is a reason to stay — it's a reason to plan: talk to your prescriber before you book anything, carry documentation, and identify a local provider in your first month, not your worst one.

One Question

If you moved tomorrow, what would be in the suitcase — and what are you hoping distance will do that you haven't yet asked of yourself?

— Randy

I’ve spent fifty years in international education and cultural exchange — a front-row seat to people changing careers, countries, and lives. If you’re putting together a panel, a podcast, or a story and want a voice from the field, just reply. Replies come straight to me, and I read every one.

One Story

Years ago, I knew a teacher — a good one, by every measure. He was growing restless. The classroom felt small to him, and the paperwork smaller. So he decided to take his students to Europe with one of the large student-teacher-led travel companies. The school board, however, forbade it. His answer to the school board? Hold the parent meetings in the basement of a local bank — off school grounds, off school time, out of the board’s reach.

As it turned out, he ended up running four of those trips over the years. Then one of the student travel companies noticed him and made him a vice president. He left teaching and moved 2,000 miles to start a new career planning trips for teachers. Each summer, he traveled in Europe, watching thousands of kids and teachers explore the world. Some days, he missed the classroom, but he was happier than ever.

He never leapt. He just kept booking the basement.

One Step

The teacher didn’t quit and hope. He ran the thing at small scale first, in a room that cost him nothing, where failure would have meant one awkward evening and no lost income.

That’s the move most career-changers skip. Before you leave anything, find your basement: the smallest, cheapest version of the new work you can run alongside the old one. Teach one workshop. Take one client. Guide one trip. Do the job once, badly, for almost no money, and see whether you want the eleventh time as much as you wanted the first.

Two rules make it work. It has to be real — a real audience, real stakes, someone who could be disappointed — or you learn nothing. And it has to be small enough that failing costs you a weekend, not a career.

Most people spend a year deciding. The basement answers in a month.

One Question

The teacher didn’t quit; he found a room the rules couldn’t reach. What’s your version of the bank basement — the small step you could take this month without anyone’s permission?

— Randy

I’ve spent fifty years in international education and cultural exchange — a front-row seat to people changing careers, countries, and lives. If you’re putting together a panel, a podcast, or a story and want a voice from the field, just reply. Replies come straight to me, and I read every one.