It’s difficult to come back here as my heart is still in the Philippines…despite all odds! Good luck in your upcoming trip.

I also had other things planned, such as starting a podcast and developing some personal web-related projects with friends, but those didn’t pan out as I had earlier envisioned because there’s just too much more interesting things to do here.

Other source of blind spots would be the environmental factors of life back home (it is easy to underestimate them). For instance, the warmer weather, especially for someone like me coming from the sunnyless Seattle area, made me want to go outside at every opportunity as I felt I had been deprived of the sun for many years. The traffic is also much more different than what it was five years ago. Today, Call Centers are widely prevalent, so you have people coming into work at Makati and Ortigas at 10 PM. This means that there is less of a ‘rush hour’ during peak times, and it struck me as odd that I would be sitting in a packed bus in EDSA traffic past 10 PM. I had to adjust my plans and frame of thought based on the various changes that occured the past few years. I still chat with Filipino friends who stayed abroad and get some flashes of the way I used to think before I had arrived home. And I would be amazed at how different my mindset is now than the way it was four months ago.

And yes, I fully agree with what you said about taking it easy to avoid getting burned out again. The past few months, I’ve been taking it easy in the local office, with occasional short bursts of extreme busyness, but always reminding myself that I need to relax and take it easy (after all, it’s the reason why I came back home in the first place).

So it would be good to continue to observe and let your plans develop and evolve, once you get a grasp of the opportunities available and what it’s like being back home again.