Coming to Denmark is never a holiday for me. Rather, it’s an experience best described as an existential crisis. You might think there’s more than a little bit of exaggeration there, but to tell the truth, I’m deadly serious.

The decision we made nearly 10 years ago to leave Denmark, where I had then lived for nearly six years, to return to Australia to live, was a decision that has never sat completely comfortably for either my wife or myself. That’s not to say a decision to return to Denmark was ever on the cards either. Reality settled somewhere in between, with neither option entirely satisfying and the winner being the status quo.

That’s why it’s so hard to come back. All the doubts return in glorious technicolour. All the things we miss are magnified a thousandfold, and even if the weather is crap at the time (which it often is in Denmark), the grass seems very much greener nonetheless. And of course the grass is very much greener over here, because it actually rains, unlike drought stricken Australia 😉

But it’s never quite enough anyway. For all the multitude of reasons we think we would be better off coming back, we never seem to have enough positives to make that unthinkable decision. Maybe it’s also in the nature of the actual decision. It would be a monstrously huge thing to uproot our family and transplant it into Danish soil. It’s crazy. We couldn’t afford a shed to live in and the government would probably not even allow me to migrate anyway, due to their very strict immigration policy.

So why can’t we let it lie? I have no answer at all. It’s one of life’s baffling mysteries. My fate is inextricably linked to Denmark, but on what terms I can’t decide. It’s one of those days where I wished I could toss a coin and accept the outcome.

Sigh….