The Beauty of Full Circle Moments

I was in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in March 2020 when the country first began to experience pandemic-related closures. Instead of spending two weeks speaking in international schools and counselling centres and then celebrating my best friend’s 40th birthday with her, I spent a week alone in my hotel room, carefully checking the latest news in China — especially Beijing, where I had left my husband. Then the Australian government told citizens abroad to come home NOW if they didn’t have a secure place to stay. Thus began three and a half years of limbo living.

March 2023 brought with it the three-year anniversary since I left for that ill-fated business trip that wasn’t. The end of in-person speaking engagements and workshops. The end of travelling abroad for work and play. The end of living in the same country as my husband. And when that anniversary came, I was in Chiang Mai, Thailand—after over two weeks in Phnom Penh. Next I flew down to Bangkok to attend a conference—echoing my first stop from three years ago, when I travelled on non-refundable tickets initially purchased for a conference cancelled due to the pandemic.

In 2023 I was there to conduct my first in-person workshops in three years. In the space of one month I spoke to large groups of educators, staff, parents, and students in two international schools in two countries. I ran numerous coaching sessions with parents and schools counsellors, plus family sessions with parents and children together. I presented to counsellors (in an international school and at an independent centre), missionaries, missionaries-in-training, and more—from many different nationalities and backgrounds. I spoke at a large conference of international school counselors, co-presenting and making lots of wonderful connections with professionals from across the globe.

I did all the things I was not able to do three years ago. And it was so good to be back! Throughout the month I made many connections with people excited to know I would be back later in the year—and it was wonderful to re-visit many of them just over six months later.

The whole month was a full-circle moment!

Those three years in between were not wasted years. The woman who stood in front of hundreds of people in March 2023 did so with greater empathy, compassion, and emotional depth than the woman three years ago possessed. I have aged in many ways—and I don’t just mean the widening streaks of white above my ears!

When I talk about Unpacking Pandemic Experiences or work with a family processing their experience of being locked out of China, I do so as one who has been there in the trenches alongside them—and who is, in many ways, still there.

All my full-circle moments, of returning to do the things I couldn’t then, have also been a time of seeing myself step into things I could not have done then. I have grown through this difficult season—and the people I serve see it.

Sometimes in life we look for opportunities to go back—to return to what was, to redeem lost time, to get opportunities back. As I reflect on my return to in-person work, I have the joy of lost opportunities met at last—and with it, the realisation that moving forward is the greater joy.

In Chiang Mai I went out for Chinese noodles with two families I went to church with in Beijing. All 12 of us around the table were locked out of China due to the pandemic, unable to return to the country we called home—and our apartments full of belongings—due to circumstances out of our control. There was joy in reminiscing, but there was more joy in catching up and seeing where we’d all landed and the new lives we were building.

I delighted in meeting up with old friends in Phnom Penh, people I have known for many years. But I also delighted in meeting and making new friends both there and in Chiang Mai—some of whom I hope I will continue to meet with in the years to come, creating new old friends.

There can be power in nostalgia, in remembering the ways we have been loved and supported in the past. It can fuel us, reminding us that good friends can be had and that they are worth investing in now. 

Full-circle moments are beautiful—not because of what was, but because they show us what is.

An earlier version of this post first appeared on A Life Overseas