Eight hours away from Toronto, watching the 2012 film Argo on the plane’s movie playlist, I thought about how its characters do things scared. They are scared because their lives are at stake if they fail, but they do it anyway because there’s no better alternative than to do it scared. Death will still catch up to them if they remain in the comfort of their hiding.
The idea of ‘doing it scared’ brought me back to why I am in this flight to Canada with my husband, uprooting ourselves from the comfort of our homeland and the closeness of our families, to start afresh with our careers: me as a PhD student while my husband figures out what work awaits him when we land. As I am typing this at 3 AM above the skies of Klyuchi—a place in Russia I just learned today—I realize how we are on our way to carve something for ourselves, although we are unsure yet what shape our efforts would take. While I am still going through the motion of another major life transition, letting things unravel as they go, I think that only by the time my husband and I finally settle in our apartment in London, Ontario, will we be able to grasp the change we are about to go through.
As long as we are together, doing things in love, I am okay to ‘do it scared.’
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