Of Hills and ValleysCultivating Resilience, Finding Purpose

From an Eighth-Floor Balcony

When I retired as a nursing instructor more than ten years early, the weight of deadlines and relentless demands finally slipped from my shoulders. It was not a sudden tear, but a slow loosening, thread by thread, of a life woven tightly around obligation. My body was tired, and my financial boat had inched close enough to shore for me to step out.

Then, starting with Malawi and continuing in Kenya, volunteering in Africa became a lantern illuminating corners of my life I had been too busy to examine.

From the eighth-floor balcony of my temporary Nairobi home, I sipped rich Kenyan masala tea and watched dusk descend on a city that refused to stand still. Below me, impatient matatu horns competed with the rhythmic cadence of Swahili conversations. Vendors called out. Engines hummed. People hurried, bargained, carried, built and began again.

Nairobi vibrated with the fierce determination of life itself.

And, for the first time in years, I had enough quiet within me to ask: Am I truly living the life of my dreams?

The answer did not arrive as a speech. It came in images.

My father laughing as an aeroplane lifted him into the sky.

My mother standing before the bungalow that replaced the mud house of our childhood.

My younger sons caring for their autistic brother while I served across an ocean.

A woman-driven tractor moving steadily through Malawian soil.

The hills and valleys of my life had not disappeared. But from Nairobi, I could finally see the landscape they had formed.

My father was ninety when we sent him to Mombasa. For the longest time, I had imagined doing something like that for him. What began as a fantastical childhood dream became a real journey across Kenya, made possible by the life I had built and by the two brothers who accompanied him.

We bought him new glasses, sharpening the blurred view of ninety years, and bright new shorts for the Mombasa sun. I followed the trip through photographs, videos and animated reports.

There he was, riding the ferry as it sliced through turquoise waters. There he was, gazing at enormous ships as though the world had just revealed a secret. He walked the ancient stones of Fort Jesus, ate Swahili food that deserved stories of its own and peered through the transparent floor of a glass-bottom boat at sea creatures moving through the shifting colour below.

He drank madafu water. He sunbathed. He received a full-body sand scrub in the shallow water. He had a massage, a pedicure and a manicure. He sat in restaurants where memories were served beside the meals.

My father went to Mombasa stooped. He returned straightened.

Back home, he plugged a flash drive into the television and replayed his adventures for neighbourhood children and any friend who would sit still long enough to watch. With every retelling, he travelled again.

His joy reached me across the distance.

So did my mother’s. Her newer bungalow stands where our family’s history once held very different architecture. After my grandmother’s tragic death at the border, we moved to a rural home where poverty clung to our heels like red dust. I remember the mud house, the wind biting through thin fabric and hunger making ordinary food feel ceremonial.

Those years planted in me a fierce resolve to beat poverty.

Today, my mother’s home is more than bricks and mortar. It is evidence of what ten siblings, bound by memory and responsibility, can build together. We share the costs of the people who help her with the cows and housework. When her health wavers, we arrange the best care we can, including visits from a local doctor, something once nearly unimaginable in that setting.

Villagers come to her door seeking food and other sustenance. Her home, once a distant dream, has become a place from which help flows outward.

Not wealth displayed.

Love made habitable.

The Valleys That Refused to Finish Me

Then there are my children, the very air I breathe.

Divorce arrived when my youngest was only three days old. Four small lives depended on me, one with significant support needs. Sleep became a battlefield of anxieties, and every sunrise announced another climb.

My oldest son, who is autistic, had survived a serious childhood illness at five. Caring for him required vigilance, advocacy, flexibility and a vocabulary of love that changed daily. For years, I stood close enough to catch almost everything, convinced the whole structure would collapse if anything dared to call for my absence.

Then I mustered the courage to volunteer in Africa, entrusting our home, and much of their brother’s care, to my two younger sons.

It felt like removing training wheels while the bicycle was already moving. I watched from a distance, braced for frequent crashes.

Instead, they rose.

They handled responsibilities that had once appeared too heavy. They cared for their brother and one another, navigating unfamiliar terrain with tenderness and growing competence. Their bond deepened. Their confidence expanded. And something in me loosened.

Motherhood had taught me to hold on.

This season taught me that love must sometimes open its hands.

There was, after all, much to celebrate, although my victories did not always arrive wearing celebration clothes. For more than ten years, immigration uncertainty followed my family because of my son’s disability and support needs. I returned to school to study nursing after earning degrees in entirely different fields. I worked as a nurse, taught nursing for more than a decade, raised four children and built businesses and investments from the ground up.

Those efforts eventually made early retirement possible.

Then I suffered a financial loss large enough to dismantle much of what I had built.

I admit I checked the obituaries twice, just to be sure I had not missed my own; I had not, so apparently I was still alive and still responsible for deciding what came next.

In losing, I had not lost the lessons. If I remained healthy, clear-minded and willing to work, I could build again. Money mattered. It was an absolute necessity. But it was not the whole definition of wealth, and it was certainly not the whole definition of me.

The loss remained real.

So did I.

Some valleys could not be crossed by earning more, working harder or producing a better spreadsheet. During those years, I made the decision to forgive the father of my children. It was not quick, easy or sentimental. I feared that releasing the anger might look like weakness. Pain had felt like proof that what happened mattered. If I put it down, would I also be denying its weight?

But forgiveness was not pretending the past had been harmless. It was refusing to drag it into every room I entered.

When the decision settled, lightness bloomed in my chest. I could breathe differently. I could build from somewhere other than injury.

And somewhere along the way, I began forgiving myself too.

The Next Mountain

My first volunteer assignment took me to Malawi, where I worked alongside members of a cooperative who initially looked outside themselves for the support they needed. We talked, assessed, planned and imagined what might become possible if they recognized the capacity already living among them.

Together, we envisioned a tractor.

At first, it belonged only to the language of aspiration. Later, they bought it.

The image of that woman-driven tractor moving across Malawian soil carried far more than machinery. The members had become their own source of support, doing for themselves what they had once expected only from elsewhere.

They had never been empty vessels waiting to be filled. They carried knowledge, ingenuity and possibility. Sometimes people do not need rescue. Sometimes they need a mirror strong enough to reflect their own capacity.

That lesson followed me to Kenya. In Nairobi, my work involved structured meetings, assessments and reports, but some of the city’s deepest lessons arrived outside conference rooms. They came through cooperative members speaking of their hopes, women whose strength wore the ordinary clothing of persistence and Uber drivers carrying entire archives behind ordinary introductions.

I had come to offer something.

Instead, service became part of my healing. Focusing on the needs of others transformed burnout into purpose and reminded me that experience becomes more meaningful when it leaves something useful behind.

From my balcony, the threads of hardship no longer looked merely dark and tangled. They sat beside shimmering strands of grace: the mud house and my mother’s bungalow; my father’s stooped departure and straightened return; the infant carried through divorce, now a young man; the sons I worried about, becoming men capable of caring for their brother; the money built, the money lost and the lessons that remained; the cooperative’s tractor; the book I had long wanted to write, finally becoming something readers could hold.

My women’s groups stood across that landscape like shelters along a difficult road. Their encouragement reminded me that resilience is rarely a solo performance. We carry one another’s names into rooms of possibility. We reflect strength back when someone has temporarily forgotten her own.

My spiritual life, too, moved through seasons of distance and return. During the most demanding years of single parenthood, we continued our family devotionals, but the urgent needs of my children often drowned out quieter whispers of faith. Duty and devotion pulled at the same exhausted body.

Still, a faint current persisted.

In the quiet of African nights, I began hearing it again. Not as certainty about every answer, but as presence.

The hills and valleys have not delivered me to a final destination. I am still becoming. There are longings I have not resolved, sleep I have not mastered, questions I continue to carry and unfinished work demanding my attention.

And my mind has already spotted another mountain.

Bloom-a-Bean™.

It is my way of carrying lessons from the mud house, the classroom, motherhood, business, financial loss and recovery into something families can plant. Literally. A bean placed in soil. A child learning to wait, water, notice and discover that what is consumed today cannot also be planted for tomorrow.

Bloom-a-Bean™ did not appear outside my hills and valleys.

It grew from them.

That is the next climb. I approach it with my heart open and my lessons packed, knowing the terrain ahead will not be flat.

Thank goodness.

A meaningful life was never meant to be a single, uninterrupted hilltop.

It is the whole landscape.

And there is still so much life left to cultivate.