A New City, New Worries.

On the flight from Japan to Barcelona, my wife needed to get a little work done, so she paid for the in-flight Wi-Fi and was working away. Then an email arrived for her.

It was from someone neither she nor I had expected to hear from. They had more projects now and were looking for people, and wanted to know if she'd like to join. They said they'd like to talk to her first, so she quickly set a date for an online meeting, and after we arrived in Barcelona, in between hunting for a place to live while moving from one Airbnb to another, she spoke with them.

She told them she was in Spain now, and what kind of work she was doing. The call ended that day with a "We'll be in touch."

Around the same time, someone connected to her work brought up the idea of launching a new project. It looked like she might be able to start several new things while living in Barcelona. She immediately began working to make it happen.

And then one more thing, at almost the same time: she heard from the president of a company she had worked with a few years earlier. The company had grown, and he wanted to know if she could take charge of a new department they were setting up. He said the company had grown this far because, when sales had slumped during the pandemic, a strategy my wife came up with and carried out had been a big hit, and it was still paying off even now.

Back then the company had only a few shops in the Kanto region, around Tokyo; now it had spread across the whole country. That time, the goal had been to bring back lost sales. This time, the company had grown so big that they could no longer see what their next move should be. That was what he wanted her help with.

Since coming to Barcelona, three new opportunities had come to her one after another. She was taking them on while continuing her current work, and on top of that she was dealing with the house hunt, opening a bank account, and applying for her TIE, the foreigner's residence card, so she was working day and night.

But a week passed without any reply from the person she'd had the first online meeting with. Even when she asked, "What happened with what we discussed the other day?", there was no word. Even now, as I write this, she still hasn't heard back.

For the second project, she had put together everything on her own, from the concept to what the service would actually offer, and got it to the point where all that was left was to launch it in Japan. But because of the circumstances of the two people she was supposed to launch it with, a certain contract became a sticking point, and it turned out they couldn't start as things stood. She suggested it could be done another way, but in the end the two of them dropped out, leaving her on her own, and the project fizzled out.

With the third request, she had actually been moving things forward with the president and the person who had proposed the new department. But partway through, it shifted toward wanting her to teach a newly hired graduate the ropes. She told them this wasn't something you could teach in a few hours; you have to actually do it, look at the results, and improve as you go. But they said they didn't have the resources for that right now, and in the end she was the one who turned it down, and that opportunity disappeared too.

She had taken on far too much at once, and the work in front of her had swollen out of control. She didn't know where to begin. On top of that, some days she had meetings starting at 3 a.m., and because of the time difference, work didn't move the way it had when we were in Japan. And then one day, she couldn't bring herself to do anything at all.

I don't have the skills to help with her work. As much as I want to help, I can't do it directly. Still, I thought about whether there was anything I could do, and what I came up with was: let's go to the sea and just sit for a while.

As the two of us walked toward the sea, I asked her what things were like right now. I couldn't give her any good advice. As we walked, she started saying she wanted to quit everything. But if she let go of all her work, our life in Barcelona wouldn't hold together either, so she didn't know what to do, she said.

So I told her that of course she could quit all of it, that what matters most is her health, and that she lives each day happily. If it was going to wear her down in mind and body, I wanted her to quit as soon as possible and head in a different direction.

There was a day when we sat by the sea and kept going around and around in a conversation like that, with no answer in sight.

As she talked to me about this and that, she seemed to gradually sort out what was in her head, one thing at a time. By the time we got back to our room from the sea, she was saying, "You know, I feel like talking it through sorted everything out!" And within a week of that day, she had cleared all of it away.

She seemed to realize there was no point worrying over things she couldn't do anything about, and since that day she's been getting through each day in good spirits again.

As for me, when a problem comes up with my work in Japan, just dealing with it can take a huge amount of energy, or keep me from moving forward the way I want. Being in Barcelona, Japan feels so far away that I lose my feel for the temperature of Japanese society, so to speak, and that worries me sometimes.

Thanks to digital technology, we can work without being tied to a place. This is without a doubt a gift of the times we live in, and it's the reason we can live in Barcelona. But at the same time, it brings its own set of problems and worries.

Even when a new project gets our hearts racing, it doesn't move forward. We don't know when the work might disappear. We don't know when or what kind of problem might come up. Dealing with Japan from so far away, in a world that exists only inside an intangible computer screen, we swing between joy and worry.

If we were in Japan, or somewhere we could get back to quickly, maybe we wouldn't have to worry this much. But I think that if we were in Japan, we'd be worrying about something else, that we couldn't go on like this. So I think this is a worry we can't avoid.

Even while we were in Japan, we more or less expected this would happen if we moved our base to Spain. Now that it actually has, it's harder than I thought. Even so, somehow we have to get through it.

The new worries aren't only about work.

Something I find myself thinking about sometimes is loneliness. Luckily, the two of us live together, so so far neither of us has had to feel lonely on our own. But most people go out to work, and through the people they meet and the connections they make there, they live their lives tied to the society of that place.

In our case, for now, we almost never go out for work and deal with people. So there's this lingering feeling that, although we live here, we're looking at the city with the eyes of an onlooker. Unless I make a move myself, I feel that even while living in Barcelona, time will pass with me barely connecting with this city at all. That's something I'm a little worried about too.

My wife and I talk about this a lot lately. At those moments when the chilly night wind suddenly carries these worries in.

Talking it over, we came to the conclusion that rather than keep working entirely online from now on, it would be best to have the core of our work be offline, and make everything else online as much as possible. That balance seemed like the best one.

Working offline also means being tied to a place. Before, we felt that being bound to a place even a little would narrow what we could do, so we avoided working that way as much as we could.

But if we have a certain amount of offline work, we can use it as a starting point to connect with people, and above all, real life is there. So now I've come to want to build that kind of life.

What I think while walking through the city, sitting at a café table, or resting on a bench outside, is that I'm a little envious of people's connections with each other, and the smiles that come from them. I smile when I order at cafés too, and at restaurants I look the server in the eye and do my best to order. I talk about all sorts of things with the owner of our apartment, and I say hello to the neighbors.

But all of that has only just begun, and I know that unless I take one more step in, I won't be able to build deeper relationships.

When I lived in Canada and Australia in my early twenties, I went to bars and clubs after work with people I met at my part-time jobs, went to cafés on days off with people I'd gotten a little closer to, and drove out at night with my housemates from the share house to look at the stars.

Each and every experience that came out of that has, without a doubt, shaped who I am now. They're memories from the past, and at the same time, they've become wonderful life experience.

Compared with that, what about now?

No part-time job, no share house housemates. Of course, my days now are truly happy. If anything, I think now is much better than back then. But I find myself a little envious of the smiles of the people in the city, the smiles that come from connections in this place.

Then again, I also think the stage of life has changed. Even among cheerful Spaniards, adults in their twenties and thirties walk through the city more quietly than teenage students do. Everyone is responsible for something, trying to accomplish something, heading somewhere.

Maybe I'm in that kind of period now too. And maybe that's exactly why I have new worries unlike the ones I've had before.

I've only lived about thirty years, but one thing I know is that worries never run out, no matter how old you get. Even when you solve what you were worried about at the time, a new worry is born right away. And it comes as something bigger than before. So I think you won't move forward if you get caught up only in your current worries. Another one is going to come along anyway.

These are my worries, about a month into living in Barcelona.

Having offline work. I want to make that happen as soon as I can. It might be in Barcelona, it might be in Japan, it might be in another country in Europe. Ideally I'd have several bases, but for now I won't think that far ahead; I want to start little by little with what I can do.

Both my wife and I are struggling with days spent facing our work in Japan from a Spain we're not yet used to. Even so, I want to do what we can, and whenever even a little space opens up, use that time to move step by step toward the ideal life we picture for ourselves in Barcelona.