Apart from the body complaining with various aches and pains, I really do enjoy growing older. It’s funny, but as each year turns over anew, my field of vision seems to expand just a little bit more, and I suddenly enjoy a new sort of comprehension for the inner workings of life. I’m talking about the stuff that they can’t teach you in any classroom.  Perhaps chalk it up to cumulative experience plus general awareness, but I’m endlessly gratified by what I uncover with each passing year.

I’m no swimmer, but I think this is a bit like heading to a favorite beach and taking your first couple of steps into the ocean. You’re already accustomed to the waterline, just as you are completely at ease with the associated rock and seaweed formations imprinting themselves beneath your feet. From here it’s easy to take a few steps into the water, and the security of shore is still close enough that you use the sand as a baseline of familiarity in which to build upon what you know. Slowly but surely, you make your way into the slosh and tumble and start to find comfort in what this newish experience feels like.

And then after some time spent testing your nerve, your day is over and it’s back to the security of the beach. If you’re a kid, you dump out all the sand accumulated in your bathing suit (you know, because you’ve gotta hang out and get battered by the surf for a bit) and you go home. Day after day you return and do it again— each time creeping out just a tiny bit more. By the season’s end, you find yourself lingering so far out that that your tiny patch of beach is only a momentary blip in a longer string of shoreline. Your perspective on the world has suddenly shifted— and this is nothing to speak of the fact that you’ve graduated to now treading water with only mystery swirling beneath your body. Acquired is a whole new comprehension for how self and landscape is stitched together. If you keep it up you discover that year after year, this understanding constantly evolves as you continue to kick and propel your body through the water.

I’ve been thinking a lot about community lately, and specifically what  makes being a part of one so endlessly important. Maybe it’s because my boss here is retiring, and his departure signals something similar within my own life. I’d like to think that both of us, in our own ways, have successfully woven ourselves into Europe’s social fabric. We have formed lots of lasting bonds, and the factors of age and appreciation for interaction have created a perspective that is far more intricate than the ones we had when embarking upon this port shifting lifestyle so many years ago.

The other day I heard someone say that after experiencing a death, moving is one of the most traumatic experiences that a person can go through. When I heard this I kind of laughed— one, because I can think of far worse things that I have experienced (some which are cured by antibiotics) but two, because in this line of work we’re moving all the time. You can make the process of moving hard or easy on yourself, but I firmly believe that the key to surviving a move (especially an international one) is learning to incorporate oneself in these new surroundings. Like it or not, the act of the moving always feels a bit like standing on the edge of a new and untested sea, and it’s simply a matter of slowly making your way in each and every time. Over and over again.

It’s been a week of goodbyes for my boss, and I am both unsurprised and in awe at the many testimonies of gratitude that have been shown to him and his wife for all they have given in their time here. And this goes beyond the workplace. They’ve been at this sort of relocation and reestablishment game for longer than I have, and selfishly, the mark that they manage to leave on each place serves as a sort of model for an introvert like me.

I have, over the course of several challenging solo moves, learned how to reach out and try to build my own foundation of familiarity— even if inertia begs me to sit on the beach enjoy the proximity of so much life support. But I force myself up, and each time I do it I feel an incremental yet positive change in my comfort level for a new place. It’s kind of like now, after living in London for almost a year and a half. This is the time where I find myself stopping mid-activity in order to pop my head above the surface for a few gulps of air, and suddenly I can see the beauty that is built up around me. I never could have appreciated such a vantage point by staying anchored to my dry beach towel back in the sande.

Like a good career officer, my boss has mastered proactivity and knows where life is taking his family next. He is leaving the United Kingdom and while it’s sad to see them go, I am certain that he and his family will not only enhance their future community, but they will continue to build upon their life perspective. Me, I have no idea where I’ll be landing once I finally leave London, but one thing that I can count on is that I’ll be leaving with a few more years of experience under my belt. My ever-creaking body may no longer be able to swim out as far as it once could, but I’ll still be keen to take on another transition. In my years of executing many moves (I just counted 11 since 1993), there’s a reason that I don’t find the act so intimidating any more. Experience really does help when we’re dealing with confidence.

But even as I have grown accustomed to boxing up things and knocking on the doors of new neighbors, there is one aspect that has never gotten easier with age and practice. It’s the unavoidable act of bidding farewell to the sights, sounds and people that have enriched your life over each space of time. It’s impossible to not grow attached to all of these things—even the stuff that drives you crazy— and it’s the non-negotiable act of self-removal that never fails to induce trauma into transition. And maybe that’s what they mean when they say that moving is so hard. Saying goodbye is hard. The best solace that I can offer is something that a fellow officer once said to me on the day we graduated from Officer Candidate School back on St. Patrick’s Day in 2000.  “It’s sad to go— but…we’ll remember.”

A beautifully-woven life, a deepened yet unspoken understanding for how all of it works, and an ever-expanding shoreline that ultimately surpasses your field of vision. The fortune of attaining each of these things is the reason why life gets better— and always remains compelling— with each passing year. I have my boss and so many others like him to thank for teaching me to understand this.