A Letter on Not Being Settled Yet
My Dearest Friend,
There is a peculiar season that comes after arrival but before settling, and I have begun to think it is one of the least talked about parts of military life.
We spend so much time preparing to leave. There are checklists taped to refrigerators, moving boxes stacked in every corner of the house, appointments squeezed into already-full calendars, and endless conversations about what comes next. Then comes the journey itself—the flights, the hotels, the passports, the exhaustion, and the relief of finally making it safely to the other side.
Everyone celebrates your arrival.
And they should.
Arriving is no small thing.
But after the congratulations fade, there is another season waiting quietly behind them. One that has no ceremony, no milestone, no photograph to mark its beginning.
The season of not being settled yet.
As I write this, we are only a few days away from moving into our apartment. After weeks of living out of suitcases, I can finally picture where our dining table will sit, where my children’s books will go, where the coffee maker will live. The apartment is waiting for us.
But it is not home yet.
Because home, I am beginning to suspect, is not something unlocked with a key.
For now, our lives still exist in temporary spaces. Every morning I open the same suitcase and choose from the same small rotation of clothes I have been living in for weeks. I have learned exactly how much can fit into the tiny refrigerator in our hotel room. I know which walk takes us to the commissary and which direction leads to the biergarten where we can pretend, for an evening, that we already know this city a little better than we do.
Beyond that, most days still require directions.
I still pause at road signs a little longer than I would like. I still study menus more carefully than I ever did at home. I still find myself thinking, I’ll figure that out once we’re in the apartment.
It is remarkable how easily I postpone life until some future version of settled arrives.
We’ll hang pictures once the household goods come. We’ll invite people over once everything is unpacked. We’ll establish a routine once the apartment feels like ours. We’ll really start exploring once we know our way around.
As though life has politely agreed to wait for us.
But it hasn’t. Life, stubbornly and beautifully, keeps happening anyway.
It happens while eating breakfast in the same hotel dining room for the fifteenth morning in a row. It happens during evening walks when you still need your phone to find your way back. It happens while watching your toddler confidently race toward the same playground she has already decided belongs to her. It happens in conversations with people whose names you are only beginning to remember. It happens while your favorite mug is still wrapped in packing paper somewhere between continents.
Temporary, it turns out, is still life.
I think that realization has surprised me more than the move itself.
I have spent so many PCS seasons treating this in-between space like something to endure quietly, as if real life were paused just beyond it. I kept waiting for everything to click into place at once—for the boxes to disappear, for the rooms to feel familiar, for the routines to return fully formed, and for me to finally exhale into something that felt like arrival.
But what I am beginning to understand is that life does not wait for that moment. It seeps in earlier, unevenly, while we are still learning where things go and how days are supposed to work. It becomes ours not all at once, but in fragments we only recognize later.
The Lesson
I used to think settling would announce itself—some quiet morning when everything finally felt aligned and unmistakably like home.
But I am beginning to think it is less an arrival than a gradual easing. A slow reduction in the number of things that feel unfamiliar, until one day you realize you are no longer translating your life before you live it.
And maybe that is all we are really waiting for. Not a moment when everything changes, but the day when life stops requiring quite so much effort to navigate.
To the Spouse Who Isn't Settled Yet
If your life still feels temporary, I hope you won’t mistake temporary for unfinished. If your furniture is still somewhere between duty stations, if your routines still exist mostly on paper, if every day requires just a little more thought than it used to, please know that you are not falling behind. You are simply living through one of the quietest parts of transition.
It may not look like progress from the outside. There are no moving trucks to wave goodbye to anymore. No airport arrivals to celebrate. No obvious milestones to point toward. Just another load of laundry. Another trip to the grocery store. Another evening walk. Another ordinary Tuesday.
But perhaps that is exactly how a life is built. Not in the dramatic moments we remember, but in the ordinary ones we almost overlook.
So don’t wait to live until you feel settled. Light the candle in the temporary apartment. Buy the flowers for the hotel room. Take the evening walk even if you still need GPS to find your way home. Laugh over takeout eaten with borrowed silverware.
Because one day you’ll look back and realize those weren’t the days before your life began. They were your life. They always were.
