Goodbye to Ukraine

It has been hard for me to write for the past few years, and this post has been no exception. But while I don’t really know why I have had this extended writer’s block, I DO know why this post has been difficult: I just haven’t known what to say. 

What do you say when a major epoch of your life comes to an end? And how can you encapsulate your thoughts when that epoch has lasted the longest, been (arguably) the most significant, and brought you so many conflicting emotions? 

Do you focus on events? Do you recall how it started, how it finished, all the things that happened around you, and how you changed through it all? Is it the range of emotions, the highs and lows that predominate? Do you dwell on the situations that almost broke you or the times that lifted you up? Is it about the challenges you overcame? 

Or is it all about the people? Do you recall the stream of faces who came into your life, some for just a while, others to stay with you to the end? Do the faces bring to mind the stories, the impacts they had on your life, what they did or did not mean to you? Do you wonder why each soul crossed your path and wonder why some meant more than others or why some who you thought would be more significant turned out to be far less? 

I suppose it really is the people who are most important. Everything in life is about people. Our main purpose in life is to find happiness, and while that happiness is indeed to be found within ourselves, there is no greater influence on our ability to find happiness than the people we associate with. 

To the Point 

As the title suggests, this post is about saying goodbye to Ukraine – the place, the feeling, and most importantly the people that have been my life for the past 13 years and then some. 

Ukraine is in my rearview mirror now. I left almost two weeks ago, and I’ve been “transitioning” in Belgium with family before moving on the United States in a few days. Yet Ukraine has not completely left me; I still have online students there and will continue to work with them. And I have friends with whom I hope I will keep in touch and see again somewhere, sometime, somehow. 

Background – A Life of Changes 

Thirteen years is a long time. It’s easily the longest time I have spent in one place (Kharkiv), doing essentially one thing (for work), and keeping company with mostly the same set of people. Until Ukraine, my life had always been about change. I’ve always had a deep need for change. I didn’t truly recognize it until later in life, but it has always driven me and pushed me to the choices I made, whether good or bad. It’s just been who I am.

From the time I was old enough to “fly the coop” my life has been about changes. A short initial stint at university was followed by a quick succession of changes mostly involving the navy: five months of training, a couple of years in Maryland, a year and a half on Guam, a few months out of the service, then back in for a year and a half of training in California and Texas before heading off to Japan. Relationships and friendships came and went; nothing stayed the same for long.

Japan was six years – only half the time of Ukraine – and it was split into two distinct three-year periods in very different places. My Colorado life after the navy was never one long, consistent period. After two and a half years at Colorado State University, it was a string of two-to three-year periods of different work, different places (including two years in Massachusetts), and three distinct circles of friends.

Only my eight and a half years working for MTB Project Management saw any kind of long-term life stability. But that was still far short of my 13 years in Ukraine. And even my career at MTB was broken up by changes: initially focused on mining in Peru, followed by three years on an environmental cleanup project outside of Chicago, and then back to South America and mining again. And during that time, I bought and sold a house in south metro Denver and moved to my dream house in the mountains. Some kind of change was always necessary.

This deeply set need for change brought me to Ukraine, first as a curious visitor in 2006, then as a part-timer in 2007, and finally on a permanent basis in May of 2008. My need for change did not truly diminish, and I certainly wrote enough about it in this blog over the years (Big Change, The Heart is Where?), but circumstances made it harder to just up and leave. And I think I also held on to certain hopes and dreams that kept me in the country longer than I probably should have stayed.

So much of my life in Ukraine, and how the country and I changed, was described in the 2016 post, Ten Years of Ukraine, so I won’t get into all those details here. This is about saying goodbye… finally.

Hard to Say Goodbye

As I mentioned at the beginning, it is very, very difficult to sum up what it has all meant to me. To be honest, a lot of my time in Ukraine was not happy. There were deep disappointments, and I had many moments of severe self-doubt about what I was doing there.

I had left a very good job and material situation in Colorado for what I told myself was a noble notion of a simpler, more personally fulfilling life of teaching and writing. But I wrestled regularly with the question of whether that was really what I had done or if I had just given up on having “goals” at all. I didn’t write, and teaching sometimes felt routine.

It often seemed that all I was doing year after year was just going with the flow: no real purpose, no direction. And for that decade and more, there was almost always the stinging pain of loneliness. But despite all of that, I lacked the energy to make the change that I always recognized I needed.

Of course, there were many positive moments. I couldn’t possibly have survived if all I felt was sadness and self-recrimination. And perhaps those positive moments helped blunt my instinctive need for change, especially in light of my continual doubt about the situation I had put myself in.

The positive moments always revolved around people: students, friends and some colleagues. From the time I started teaching, my students have always been what made it feel worthwhile. Private sessions always felt more like chats with a friend (tea and chocolates included), and indeed some of those students did become close friends as well.

Groups at the IT companies – EPAM, Global Logic, Intetics – almost always raised my energy level. They were never exactly the same: you could do the same conversation topic a dozen times and each session would follow its own path. That always kept it interesting and fun. And the companies offered many opportunities over the years to communicate with students out of the classroom: uniquely themed corporate parties, smaller team parties, and other sessions.

Perhaps the best thing about my years of teaching in Kharkiv were the moments when a student would take the time to thank me for my lessons or tell me that I helped them. There is no better satisfaction than knowing that your efforts are not in vain, that they are appreciated, and that they truly help people. Those were priceless moments.

But it was among my friends, largely students who became friends, that the best times were had. Early on, I became sort of a focal point for them to get together. I hosted many dinner parties over the years: Thanksgiving, chili or fajitas, or just small gatherings to play Dixit or watch movies. I enjoyed doing it partly because it allowed me to enjoy the company of people I really liked, but also because these were sort of unique in our community, and my friends and students always seemed to enjoy them.

For a year or so in the early days I hosted afternoon sessions once or twice a month to discuss the Power of Intention, reinforce positive thinking, try some meditation and, of course, practice English. Those were popular sessions, but they did become a bit tiring for me, so I had to drop them.

Travel from Ukraine

Living in Ukraine afforded me the opportunity to travel that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. Western Europe was always a short, affordable plane ride away. And I was even able to enjoy the company of some of my friends on those trips: Portugal and the Azores, Spain, France, northern Italy, Georgia, Turkey. I wish I had done and seen more, but those still left me with great memories. And being so close to Switzerland and Belgium meant that I had a much easier time visiting my daughter and her growing family. I guess I have Ukraine to thank for that.

Special People

As I was working on this post, I kept thinking of a few specific individuals who really had an impact on me. Some of them probably know it, a few others might be surprised. There is a part of me that wants to mention them specifically so that they will know how important they were. But that is better done privately or not at all. Sometimes it is best to assume that they know and don’t need acknowledgement.

But there have been a small handful of individuals who stand out and whom I will never forget. A couple of them can even claim some responsibility for me not actually packing up and leaving those many times I thought about it. They were hard to leave behind. I hope they know who they are and how important they have been in my life. And I hope even more that our paths might yet cross again.

So goodbye to Ukraine, to Kharkiv, and to all the people who participated in my life for the past 13 years. And to those people: thank you! Thank you for being interesting, thank you for (mostly) being good students, thank you for the things you taught me about Ukraine and more. Thank you for the help so many of you gave me so freely when I needed it. Thank you for your amazing kindness and generosity. And in a few cases, thank you for your love.

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Terrible Timing

Let’s face it: my timing is often really, really bad.

On the sunny Tuesday morning of September 11, 2001, I was on an airplane awaiting a flight from Denver to Chicago to return to the project I was working on. I had a comfortable seat in business class and was just waiting for boarding to finish and the flight to get underway.

But something was wrong. The time to close the door and push back from the boarding bridge had come and gone, but we were still there. And there was some commotion among the crew. Another passenger mentioned that an airplane had struck one of the World Trade Center towers, but we all assumed it was probably a small plane that didn’t do any real damage, and we couldn’t see the connection to our delay.

Then either the captain or the lead flight attendant gave us the news: a serious incident was underway in New York and was affecting air travel all across the country. They were unsure when or even if our flight would be cleared to depart. We all began to feel like something major was happening, something that would present a big disruption. A short time later we were told a second plane had hit a tower, that it was very serious, and that we would have to get off the plane and make other arrangements. No flights were being allowed to take off anywhere in the country.

Of course we all know what happened that day and how it affected air travel for the next several days and beyond. It was bad timing for me. I had to figure out how I was going to get home from the airport because taxis were not being allowed to come to the terminal. What’s more, my luggage had already been put on an earlier plane and was not available: it was in some city somewhere between Denver and Chicago.

Fortunately, I was able to rebook my trip for the following Saturday and find a fellow passenger who had a car and was willing to give me a lift home. My missing suitcase got back to Denver on Friday, just in time for me to claim it and recheck it the next morning to get to Chicago.

Yeah, that was bad timing. But I suppose it could have been worse. I could already have been in the air and forced to land in someplace like Omaha, Nebraska. And my timing was certainly not as bad as for those people who had taken off from Boston or Washington that morning only to be incinerated when their planes were crashed into those buildings. My timing wasn’t as bad as for the workers in the buildings who were killed or the firefighters and others who lost their lives trying to save them.

It was only a minor inconvenience for me, far worse for a lot of other people. I have never lost sight of that.

I have had a few other instances of bad timing in the past. I was on Guam when a “super typhoon” hit the island. I got caught in a blizzard on I-95 somewhere north of Portland, Maine, just a month after I returned from Guam. The POS car I had just bought completely broke down in the midst of heavy snow, swirling winds, and subzero temperatures. I might have frozen to death there if a snowplow hadn’t come along and rescued me. And Colorado snows caught me at bad times more than once.

 Those are just a few examples, but I don’t think they are any more significant than what most other people have encountered in their lives. And I have been fortunate enough to have missed a few bad things too.

This Time my Timing Really Sucks

All of this brings me to my present situation. And this time, I don’t think my timing could be much worse. After living in Ukraine for just about 12 years, I decided that it was finally time to leave. I had been thinking about this for a long time, and I kept putting it off for various reasons. But by late 2019, I knew that the time had come. It was only a matter of deciding when exactly to go.

The key date in all of this was March 29, 2020, which is when my residency permit expires. I have had to renew this permit annually since I first got it in March of 2013. I decided that there was no point in renewing it again since I was going to leave. Sure, I could have gone ahead and renewed it and then left in May or June, but I felt that would have been a bit dishonest.

So, I gave my company my notice in January and began preparing. I set the end of February as my last day at work and 21/22 March as my date to fly from Ukraine to Belgium. I also made plans for a vacation in Ireland during the first three weeks of April and a second trip to another European destination from late April to early May. It was all organized and looked good.

Then the Wuhan virus hit.

You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere!

We all know the unbelievable whirlwind that has kicked up over this virus in the past weeks. It spread like wildfire and has killed thousands (mostly in China and Italy), and it has crippled the economies of countries all over the world. And a big effect is that it has shattered the travel plans of millions of people. There has never been anything like it.

Just before it hit I had made extensive travel plans. Those travel plans, of course, have been shredded.

In what seemed like the blink of an eye, the world suddenly went mad. Countries banned incoming flights; cruise ships were unable to dock anywhere; cities, states and countries went on partial or total “lockdowns” curtailing domestic air, rail and bus travel. Large gatherings were banned. Schools were closed and students put on extended vacation, and millions of workers were told to work from home. “Social distancing” became a thing.

The National Hockey League suspended its season, as did just about every other athletic league in the world. Concerts and other large meetings were canceled, including political rallies in the United States (it’s an election year). Restaurants, cafes and bars closed. Thanks to the irresponsible media, people panicked and started buying and hoarding supplies (most strangely including toilet paper).

All this madness exploded in such a short time that it is still hard to get my head around all that has happened. And in the middle of all this, I had a carefully organized plan to leave Ukraine, do some traveling, and then head to the U.S. for a while.

I was supposed to leave on 21 March, but as of 17 March, all transportation in or out of Ukraine is suspended. They say it’s for two weeks, and my flights were canceled. I rebooked for 1 April, but on 19 March I was informed that those flights were canceled. The airline ceased operation of its ticketing call center, so I was left with no alternative but to use an online form to request another rebooking. I am still waiting for some word.

I have doubts now that I will get out of Ukraine in time to make my planned flight from Brussels to Dublin to begin my vacation in Ireland. I really don’t know when I will be able to get out of Ukraine. And on top of that, Belgium is on a pretty strict lockdown, so I am not sure whether I would even be able to go there in early April.

But yet, I have to leave Ukraine soon: my residency permit expires on 29 March. It’s a foregone conclusion that I will not be able to leave the country before the permit expires, but I have assurances that I will not be penalized under the circumstances. However, I don’t know how long after the expiration the authorities will allow me to stay.

I suppose it goes without saying now that my Ireland trip is probably a goner. One of the B&Bs I planned to stay at in April has already informed me that they will be closed. And the state of things in Ireland is very unsure. It certainly seems like early/mid-April is going to be a bad time to try and visit the land of me ancestors. It looks like my focus tomorrow will be on canceling those plans.

My second trip, from late April to early May, is probably also going to have to be canceled. Maybe I’ll be able to move the Ireland trip to that time period and just drop the second trip entirely.

My grand plan included leaving Belgium sometime around the 18^th of May and flying to Colorado with a five-day layover in Iceland. I haven’t booked it yet, but even that is looking like it might not work out.

The thing is that no one really knows how long this thing will last. Will it subside in April? Will it go on until May? Longer? It’s all a mystery at the moment.

Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda…

If I had made different plans, this wouldn’t have devastated me the way it has. If I had left at the end of 2019, I would probably be in the U.S. now. If I had decided to renew my permit and stay in Ukraine until May or June, I’d simply be riding it out here until it subsided elsewhere. Kharkiv has not yet seen a single instance of the infection, so it’s about as safe a place as there might be.

But, I did not do either of those things. Unknowingly I set travel plans for the worst time to travel that there has ever been – outside of an active shooting war. Yep, my timing was really terrible on this.

I can’t change things, of course. I just have to deal with the situation as it is and try to find the best way through it. That’s all any of us can do in these kinds of circumstances.

But it sure sucks!

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Getting Short

I’m starting to get that familiar old feeling: I’m a short-timer.

“Short-timer” is the feeling you get when a period in your life is approaching its anticipated end. Most often it’s about the looming end of a job or of living in a particular place. You know the end is coming soon, and a big change is approaching. Your time in the current job or place is short.

You might have thought about such a change earlier, but it was not certain or was still rather distant. Now the change is real, and you can see it on the horizon. There is excitement, but there is also some fear. The key is to control and minimize the fear while embracing the excitement and letting it energize you.

The reason I have that short-timer feeling is that I am coming to the end of one of the longest periods of my life. In just a little more than a week, I will leave the company I have been working with in one form or another for 11 and a half years, full-time for almost five. And even more significantly I am leaving Ukraine in just about a month, ending an “adventure” that began in 2006 and became full-time in mid-2008. But more about that later in this post.

In the Navy

The first time I was really aware of being a short-timer was when I was in the navy and stationed on the island of Guam. My assignment on Guam, as well as my enlistment in the navy, was coming to an end in December. I was going to be leaving behind a tropical paradise I had become very used to for 18 months and saying goodbye to some of the best friends I had ever had up to that point in my young life.

That year and a half on Guam was one of the most influential times in my life. It shaped me in many ways: some good, some not so good. Early in that time I suffered what was probably the most gut-wrenching emotional trauma of my life (it didn’t happen on the island), and when I returned to the island after dealing with it, I fully embraced the “sex, booze and rock ‘n roll” lifestyle with my friends. But it was just a “crutch” to try to deal with what had happened earlier. They were many wild times, and toward the end I found myself growing tired of the partying and found a new crutch: religion.

I left the life I knew on Guam for one of uncertainty. I returned “home” to Massachusetts for a time, but I had no idea what I would do next. I missed my life on Guam, especially being in frigid New England in the middle of winter and with no friends. I was totally lost. I was insecure. By March, I had agreed to reenlist in the navy with the promise of being sent to language school and becoming an intelligence analyst.

But I still remember the short-timer feeling during the last month or two on Guam. While there was some excitement at the approaching change, there was actually a lot more fear. What was coming after Guam was unknown; I had no plan, no dream. It was a black hole.

The next time I really felt that short-timer feeling was years later when I was wrapping up my six years in Japan, as well as ending my overall navy service. This time, however, I knew what I was heading into: I was going to return to Colorado and attend Colorado State University to finish my degree.

It was all planned and set, so there wasn’t that same “black hole” feeling, but there were still some uncertainties. I was almost 30 and had not really lived as a civilian for most of my adult life up to that point. Plus, I was headed back to a marriage relationship that had never really worked, and I seriously doubted that it could be made to work. You can’t “reinvigorate” something that never really had any vigor.

Although I had plans and knew where I was headed, there was still that odd feeling of having the days wind down toward the inevitable departure date. I had begun to chafe at certain aspects of military life by then, but I did enjoy the intellectual challenge of my work in navy intelligence. I was very good at what I did and got a lot of accolades for it. I would miss that feeling of importance, and I would also miss keeping tabs on all those “commie” ships and aviation units. I had gotten to know some of them so well that they almost seemed like old friends.

Leaving the University

I spent two and a half years at Colorado University completing my degree. Although there were some difficult times, like getting divorced just a few months after I had arrived from Japan, my years at CSU were some of the best of my life, in many ways even better than Guam. Fort Collins at that time was a wonderful place to live. I had my motorcycle, I had some really special friends, I enjoyed the university environment and had more good times then I can count. And I found – and lost – the most significant love of my life.

In that final spring, as graduation was approaching and big changes were looming right behind it, I again began to feel that short-timer feeling. I was leaving a fairly carefree and fun life and headed into the world of regular work days and all that comes with that. I had a job lined up, but still I felt some trepidation about the change. I wasn’t confident that it was all going to work out – and for good reason.

There have been some other short-time situations along the way: leaving the Colorado Lottery and leaving Colorado to return to Massachusetts for a time, leaving the company I worked for there and Massachusetts two years later to return to Colorado, and leaving MTB, the project management company I worked at before I made the move to Ukraine.

Leaving my house in the mountains was a different sort of feeling. I didn’t really face the reality of it until the last few days when I packed up my stuff and drove away.

Leaving Ukraine

And now, here I am as a short-timer again. I have been talking or writing about making a big change for years, but only last year I finally began to make it a reality. I have known for some time that I would be leaving in early 2020 and I set the timetable just after New Year. It began to really hit me in mid-January when I scheduled my last courses at EPAM. It felt strange to know that this would be the last time I would do these courses, and these students would be my last.

And as the time has grown closer, I’ve been feeling it more and more. A few weeks ago I started purging my stuff. I sold my bike and have arranged to sell or give away a number of other things I have collected over the past decade to create a comfortable home here. I can’t take them with me, so better to find good homes for them. But the process of doing this really drives home the reality of the end being very nearly here.

One aspect of being a short-timer that has never really affected me, however, is falling into the “don’t care” mode and just doing the bare minimum at work. In the military, it was common for short-timers to be the least reliable workers. In combat situations (which I never faced) it was understood that once you got short, you had to do everything possible to avoid putting yourself in danger so that you could just survive those final weeks and days.

I don’t think that way. Perhaps in a combat situation I would, but in normal work situations, I’ve always been fully engaged right to the end. In the past few weeks I have still found myself tweaking and improving parts of my courses, as I always have, and even creating a few new things.

This will probably be the last time I will really have this short-timer feeling. I don’t imagine I will ever again be in such a situation. I see the remainder of my life as being more of a free-flowing, independent endeavor in which I do what I want to do where I want to do it (finances permitting). I guess that is fitting because in reality, I have never been a very “settled” kind of person. Staying in one place, as I have for the past decade, seems to be contrary to who I am, and it is probably why I have often felt so much anxiety here for the past few years. I have been overdue to make a change.

So I am short. And very soon everything is going to change. I am excited, though not as much as in my younger years. And I have a bit of fear, but again not as much as a few other times. What I do notice about this time is more sadness than usual. I am not sad to be leaving the company or Ukraine, but I know that there are a few people here whom I am really going to miss – a lot. Leaving them behind is the hardest part.

But that’s life. It’s a short-timer thing.

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