One of the perks of living abroad is that you can develop some pretty amazing pen-pal-ships with friends back home. My first “pen pal” continues to be wonderful with her correspondence from home. We are writerly types to begin with, so we keep each other honest with our consistent and lengthy and empathetic exchanges. They are true letters. It’s also been an added treat to get to know her on the page as much as I have walking home to our old Russian Hill apartments, in the audience at shows, and around many a dinner table.

I have another dear friend who has reached out from afar to share her life and to really inquire into our lives here, which means so much since it isn’t always easy for others to visualize. Recently, she asked me what “little revelations” I have now that Ryan and I are one year into marriage. She wanted to know if my life felt like a dream. If anything was ever challenging. Or if it was all “just perfect fun and book-binding adventures.”

“Little Revelations” : Finding the end of the road can look like the beginning, Punta de Lobos, 2010/11

Her questions were straightforward and also indicative of real curiosity, a curiosity I appreciated because I knew she was looking for real answers. And I provided them, telling her what I had learned, where it was challenging, and where the fun and adventures fit in. While I won’t share on the blog exactly what I told her in our correspondence, I think it’s important to summarize my answer: we live a simple life here in Santiago. And I like it that way.

I don’t mean simple in any sort of dull sense. I just mean that we have streamlined our lives down to some rewarding basics. We might spend all weekend hanging out at home, side by side yet respectively consumed by music (Ryan) or writing/reading (me). Then we might rejoin, make dinner, have a long conversation about something I never could have predicted when we sat down, and call it a great day. I’m sure most of you have similar ways to rest from the workweek and recharge. But the simplicity feels like more than rest.

Remember you’re a team.

I’ve spoken to a few other expats about this simple Santiago life. It doesn’t mean we don’t work (we do), it doesn’t mean we don’t travel (we do), and it doesn’t mean we don’t have families to take care of or copious amounts of bureaucratic paper work to sort out along with the various emotions that arise when you live so far from your family, your confidantes, your language. We have all of that in varying degrees. But overall, it’s easy to live simply here. The social commitments are fewer for us newbies, the sense of adventure can be born of what would otherwise be a mundane trip to the post office, and we aren’t in a rush to see all of South America with every long weekend that comes around. We are taking our time because we have the time. We live here; we aren’t just visiting. I haven’t overextended myself… yet.

I realize many of these new habits are due to our age and place in life and our great fortune to be able to  live comfortably and to want for little. But our livelihood here is still very grounded in the simple realities of documentation and making dinner and organizing parallel lives and minding the details; it’s not an untethered dream. In past posts, I may have chalked these realities up to “challenges,” but now, seven months in, I also see them for their fundamental necessity to the stability of our lives abroad.

Keep chasing your own passions.

As for what all of this means for our first year of marriage, our cohabitating simple life is also one I only really know in Chile, which will make this place special no matter where else we go. Besides our actual wedding and our recent trip home, I technically don’t “know” our marriage in California, which is funny for two native Northern Californians. We were raised there, we met there, the state and its beauty and temperament are forever part of our respective characters, but we technically never lived there together. So that is something in our future that I look forward to discovering. That is the part I “dream” about per se.

The “right now” feels very real, even though “being a newlywed in Chile” certainly never factored into the the 10- or five-year plan when I was living in NY or SF. Occasionally, I’d write a travel article or plan a trip and wonder about what it would be like to pick up and move. But how rarely in our real adult lives do we get the opportunity to do so? But now, “life in Chile” is very real, as is our commitment no matter where in the world we live, as is our rented furnished apartment five stories up on the eastern side of Santiago, where I sit writing this while Ryan plays his guitar.

And whatever you do, keep finding ways to laugh.

But it wouldn’t be nearly as calm or simple or worth it if I didn’t know I had friends like my pen pals to reach out to and count on… if I couldn’t express a thought and know you all might read it and relate to it and therefore be able to better visualize what exactly it is we’re doing way down at the bottom of the globe.

Any one else have “little revelations” to share about their commitments? To people? To work? To different parts of the world? I’d love to hear!