On my way home from a recent work trip, a friend sent me a text that stopped me in my tracks. He’d realized something I hadn’t: when my plane landed in Houston, I would have officially traveled around the world.
I can’t fully explain what happened next except that I cried. Happy tears, the kind that catch you off guard. They weren’t really for the me sitting in the middle of the Singapore airport. They were for a younger version of me: a little girl in a mobile home in a town of 100 people in southern Oregon who never could have imagined any of this.
The trip itself took me from Houston to Amsterdam to Delhi to Mumbai to Singapore and back alongside a group of leaders I learned from every single day. Long hours. Exhausting travel. And completely transformative, the way international trips always seem to be for me. The world is so much bigger and more varied and more alive than I knew growing up.
Here’s the thing, though: 14 years ago, I made myself a promise. I would get a passport and travel internationally for my 30th birthday. The dream was Thailand. The reality was British Columbia. Beautiful, but a quick hop from home and well within my comfort zone.
Then Mexico. Still North America, still close.
Moving to Houston cracked something open. Two airports, more airline options than I knew existed and suddenly the world felt reachable. Costa Rica with my girls. Eastern Canada with them too. We saved up for a couple years and pulled off a whirlwind family trip through London, Paris, Barcelona, and Rome in 2021.
I genuinely thought that was it. France had always been my big dream {five years of high school French will do that to you} and I’d gotten to share it with my girls when they were old enough to take it all in. Mission accomplished, right?
Then came a career change that opened doors I didn’t even know existed. Paris for work. India. Paris again, this time with my youngest as a brand-new high school grad. Venice. More Paris. India and Singapore. And there’s more on the calendar before the year is out.
I look at that list and I know how lucky I am. I don’t take a single boarding pass for granted.
But here’s what I keep coming back to and what I want my girls to know {what I want every mom and every daughter to know!}: You have no idea what’s coming for you.
That girl in the mobile home couldn’t have pictured this. She couldn’t have imagined her daughters growing up with passports full of stamps, talking about Tokyo and Buenos Aires like they’re already on the list. She couldn’t have imagined Houston, or the job, or the friend who’d text her mid-voyage to point out she was about to circle the globe.
So whatever you think your ceiling is? Question it. Whatever box you’ve put yourself in because of where you came from or what you were told was realistic? The universe has its own plans and they are often so much bigger than the ones we draft for ourselves.
