1 Year In Costa Rica
**This is taken from my monthly newsletter, The DOT. If you don’t already receive it in your inbox (wtf?) then sign up now, or we can no longer be friends.**
We just celebrated (acknowledged) our 1 year anniversary moving to Costa Rica. It feels like a lifetime ago that we said goodbye to Brooklyn and began this Pura Vida journey, yet at the same time, it feels as if this is just getting started.
How can we remember everything that has transpired over the past 375ish days, the good, and the not so good? If only there were some record, a log, if you will, that kept track of our daily happenings.
I always knew Dot Today, where I narrate my life on a daily basis, would come in handy at some point. Let’s allow it to guide us down this lane of memory.
We arrived on October 17th, 2020, to an unceremonious welcome party, so much so I left you with a cliffhanger and revealed the punch line in Part II. Our house had been sold, and we needed to find a place to live. Remarkably, the brand new house next door was just about finished and on November 1st we slid to the right with all of our stuff.
Meanwhile, we began to settle in, starting 1st grade and Pre-K 3s for the boys at La Paz, going for beach runs (a new form of exercise for me), procuring Randy’s Box, my connection to almost every piece of content in the world, meeting Pedro the fish guy, and being reminded of my incredible admiration for ants.
Location agnostic, we breathed a huge sigh of relief when President Biden became official…knowing that we wouldn’t be ‘stuck’ here in Costa Rica for 4 more years.
My youngest son, Dre, didn’t know how to swim when we arrived, now we have to wrestle him out of the water. My oldest son, Bodhi, lost his first tooth.
Covid made things tricky, for all of us, obviously, but in particular it kept the boys home from school on a few occasions and overall made our goal of building community difficult. Hanging out with people, at all, early in our stay was a rarity.
There are so many pockets of this country to explore, so we tried our best to cross some off the list. Buena Vista Del Rincon, Nosara (more than once), Arenal, Samara, and more recently, San Jose, and Monteverde. Some kickass day adventures and experiences as well, like seeing the turtles in Ostional, ziplining, touring Palo Verde, or trekking through land and sea to the Catarata La Leona.
Mid-January I was introduced to the world of NFTs by way of NBA Top Shot, and the topic has become a regular feature in this newsletter ever since. Following my curiosity and diving in head-first has changed my life forever. This is not hyperbole. I now own a Bored Ape, a MetaHero, and a top 0.1% Top Shot account, as well as countless other things you wouldn’t believe have value.
We said good-bye, from a distance, to our beloved pup Benji, a 14yr old terrier-dachsund mix who didn’t have the energy to join us on this Costa Rican adventure. He shortly thereafter didn’t have the energy for much at all. We miss him, always.
In the spring we began to have a run of visitors, family only this time around…but early 2022 is booking up fast so make your plans ASAP :).
I challenged myself with a commitment to 75 Hard, which came along with two workouts per day, tons of water, daily reading, no alcohol, and a no cheating allowed diet plan. I realized during this how important mindset is, looking at new habits, experiences, challenges, and approaching by saying to yourself, this is just the way it is now. I completed the 75 days, by the way.
I did a fun little project featuring a different classic rap song every single day for one year straight, ending on August 31st of this year.
My oldest son became a swimmer. My youngest, a comedian.
We left Costa Rica in early July, the easy decision to run it back for another school year long in the rearview mirror. At the same time we were very excited about a return to New York, to see friends we hadn’t seen in months, to have family around, to visit all of our favorite spots, to get vaccinated. We even had some alone adult time frolicking in Manhattan thanks to a generous friend giving us his apartment for a week while he was out of town. We ate our faces off and enjoyed wandering aimlessly around NYC.
Then, life punched us in the gut. Hard. Our fun NY plans were overtaken by doctors and hospitals and MRIs and biopsies and surgery and recovery. The return to Costa Rica was delayed, longer (and unknown how much longer at the time) for my wife than for myself and the boys. We took a bittersweet trip here on September 2nd and attempted to get back to life, an impossibility without our complete squad.
Luckily, two weeks later on September 16th we became whole once again. Since then we’ve been enjoying as much as we can, with new friends, with this beautiful land, with each other. There is still some work to be done and we will all have an extended stay in New York this winter, but I fully believe that early 2022 we return to Costa Rica intact, and ready to rock. Stay tuned for details in next October’s year two review ;).
If I were to summarize this past year I would simply say, we lived. We smiled and cried through a gauntlet of emotion. We embraced the unknown of a foreign land. We welcomed adventure. We were tested.
We went from Pura Vida to Dura Vida, but the sun is rising again.
