2025: A year of transition. A year of reckoning. A year where we kept restarting before we could finish.
In Jan, I wrapped up my time at Casetify. I rejoined the corporate world in 2024 because the opportunity was intriguing. But 12 months back inside a company forced a tough self realization: what actually matters to me? I found the answer and realized this wasn’t the path to act on it. So I moved on.
From Jan to June, I poured everything into our school as it transitioned to be led by a team. The work was intense and meaningful, and the people were excellent. Days flew by. My world shrank to the school, and it felt clean.
Then the unimaginable happened. Our site was sold to a new landlord and we were served an eviction notice. Overnight, we went from building to surviving. Where could we move? Where would the money come from? Will parents stay with us?
June to August was supposed to be about moving our family (and our dog) from HK to the UK. Instead, it became a scramble: searching for funders, visiting sites, chasing options that looked promising and then collapsed. Hopeful became hopeless on repeat. We had to keep parents and teachers optimistic, realistic, and informed, while fighting to do the same for ourselves. Those were some of the hardest months of my life.
We worked until the last minute: left school at 8pm, reached the airport at 2am. We left HK two days before our daughter’s first day in a new school system. We didn’t properly pack up our home. We left it behind for “later,” whenever “later” shows up.
In the UK, we rebuilt the basics while trying to find a path forward for our school from thousands of miles away. My wife traveled back and forth. We are living a rhythm that still doesn’t feel like ours.
The year split cleanly in half. The 1st 6 months felt simple and pure: effort matched purpose, and the future felt legible. The 2nd 6 months were the opposite: harder work, foggier outcomes, zero guarantee of anything stable. Even now, the uncertainty hasn’t eased. We live in the UK, but our future is still tied to HK. Physically we’ve moved. Practically, we haven’t.
The trials of 2025 pulled my wife and me closer. She negotiated, fought, and led—while speaking fluently across worlds (parents, bankers, billionaires). She started driving again after a 20 year hiatus because our kids needed it. She ran a fundraiser so effective that Waldorf schools in the UK invited her to share what worked. Watching her made it impossible not to admire her more. Her wins made me feel responsible. If she was going to grow that fast, I had to grow faster—for her, for our family, and for our school.
I’m a planful person. A capital-J in MBTI terms. I like clarity and clean lines. And yet the universe has made this season as ambiguous as I can tolerate, almost as if it’s doing it on purpose.
It can feel cruel. But there is also grace: even if I am forced to deal with real uncertainty, I get to do it with the best partner I could ever ask for.
Leave a Reply