Let Destiny Guide You

A fleeting moment slows down before you and suddenly your senses are enveloped by the mundane. What once was the ordinary sounds of everyday life become the sounds of possibility as the horizon gives you a beckoning call. A call from destiny takes an ordinary moment, brings a feeling, that turns into desire, that starts a fire in the engine of your heart. A moment that on its own would be completely unremarkable, forgotten to the passage of time, is now permanently etched in the back of your mind, gnawing at you. A constant reminder that life is not what it's meant to be. And you are left with a choice, ignore it or let it guide you.

Ignoring it is safe, it keeps you within a comfort zone that has carefully been curated for you, but it is not without consequence. You will feel stuck along the constantly flowing river of time. Like a stone that sits on the bed of a rapid rushing river, month after month, year after year the water rushes past you as you sit still immovable. However, as the rapid current causes the waves to beat against the stone the stone is slowly being deteriorated. Piece by piece your soul deteriorates with every missed opportunity, every obedient action to the structured life that is expected of you, every happy passing person who seems to be living their dream while you sit within your "comfort” zone. That memory gnawing away at your subconsciousness, however, is only as far as you push it. You could choose to embrace it, pull it up a chair at the control board, and allow it to grow. To do so would be painful, it would require sacrifices, and the timing to our end goal may take longer than anticipated, tricking us into thinking that we’ve failed. But that pain many of us shy away from is exactly what's necessary for growth, for change, and for life.

This happened for me one ordinary November day in 2018. I, a Canadian born and raised in the rural parts of New Brunswick, and my ex-husband were visiting his native country, Japan. There, looking down a typical road in Tokyo, I became overwhelmed with the feeling that I needed to live here someday, and that was it the little gnawing memory had been created. There wasn’t any spectacular festival or anything that made this road particularly noteworthy, but this road I wouldn’t be able to point to on a map became the beckoning hand of destiny calling me. The only question was how was I going to answer?

While married, my husband and I talked about the possibility of moving to Japan for a year after having children, so that their family in Japan would be able to spend some quality time getting to know them, and for the time that was satisfactory. However, as that obviously wrong marriage ended, the future I had been carefully planning was blown to smithereens and while the smoke still smouldered from the wreckage of my marriage, that little gnawing thought in the back of my mind woke up. It realised that my plan for moving to Japan someday was gone and it started to demand a new one. With my future now completely uncertain, I realised that the world was my oyster. Just because I wouldn’t be going to Japan with a family any more didn't mean I couldn't still go through with a plan to move there. I just needed to tweak the strategy a bit. If my goal was to live there for at least a year to ensure I would get a full experience of the culture, then I would need a visa and because I wasn't so fortunate as to be born into affluency, I would need the ability to earn money. So, I started to scour the internet for options that would suit my circumstances.

Getting a job teaching English in a school is typically the obvious choice for visa seekers such as myself, however you need a 4 year degree to teach in a school and I only have a two year degree, so that was out. I thought next about the possibility of a working visa, for that I would need to get a full-time job that would sponsor me. Funnily enough all the job listings that would sponsor a visa that I could find required you to already be in Japan on a different visa (that they would change once you got hired). As a Canadian I could apply for a working holiday visa and then hope to secure a full-time job before it expired. However, the thought of getting to Japan and looking for a full-time job on my own as quickly as possible without knowing Japanese wasn’t something that greatly appealed to me, so that was out. My next option was a student visa, which can allow you to work part-time if you apply for it, but what school would I attend to make this happen and what would I study? While investigating I learned that you can get a student visa while attending a Japanese Language Learning School and the longest program length was 2 years. Perfect!

Now that I had my heading, I needed to learn the requirements, make a plan, and figure out a timeline. In order to get a student visa I needed a sponsor. That sponsor could be me but only if I had full-time employment for two years and the equivalent of 1,000,000 yen. I had the full-time job, so all I needed was the money. Unfortunately due to COVID and my moral compass and fear of getting caught stopping me from doing a bank job I wasn’t able to actually move to Japan as soon as I would’ve hoped. Slowly over the course of a few years I was able to scrape just enough money together to meet the requirement and with COVID lockdowns finally lifting for new students in Japan I was finally able to start making the dream a reality. In April of 2023, five years after I heard destiny’s beckoning call, I stepped off the plane at the Narita airport ready for my next adventure.

Within the months leading up to the move I was awash in a mixture of emotions. Excitement, sadness, joy, fear, and more than one panic attack that made me want to run home to my mommy, but while in the taxi going from the airport to my new home, the only emotion I felt was that this was right. Like all the stars in the universe were aligned and this was exactly where I was always meant to be at exactly the time I was meant to be here. I don't fully know what destiny has in store for me now that I’m here, but I am more than ready to find out.