Kiki Kienstra had a good job teaching kindergarten, a nice apartment, and a community of friends. “I didn’t have a big need for change,” she remembers. “You know, everything was fine, so why rock the boat?”
One day, on a whim, she saw Finding Nemo, a Pixar movie about a clownfish named Marlin on a quest for his missing son. At one point, Marlin and his traveling companion Dory find themselves inside a whale – they must decide whether to continue to cling to the whale’s tongue or let go and face an unknown future.
“I realized when I saw that scene, that I needed to make a decision about my life,” Kiki says. “Just staying in my life, just hanging onto the tongue, I wasn’t doing anything. I needed to let go of the tongue and see what happened.”
Kiki summoned up the courage to teach abroad in Mexico. Marlin and Dory, of course, escaped through the whale’s blowhole, and found Nemo.
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