Perspective is always better drawn from a distance and my opportunity to see the bigger picture came on a plane in the skies over Africa.
Another sleepless night, but this time at 40,000 feet on the way to Kenya rather than waking up with cold sweats over finances and licencing or after recurring dreams about buried pipes bursting.
It was my first return visit to our old home of Nairobi in five years – where I was a journalist and my wife Ana was a diplomat – and it came as I lost perspective on one of the most difficult days on this crazy journey so far.
In the final stages of building a tourism lodge with half a dozen or so rooms, big things are happening in our valley … but they’ve been wearing us down.
Another no-show from our architect and another long delay was the final shove towards the realisation we weren’t going to be fully open this year.
We’ve not built anything before, certainly don’t have endless resources, and are now trying to navigate complicated bureaucracy without a map.
There have been many challenges, pressured decisions and self-reflections on whether we would ever have started this madcap scheme if we knew how it would unfold.
Now there are even deeper doubts about what we can do before the debts are called in and repayments begin and spiral above predictably lower autumn and winter income.
But landing on a sunny evening in Amsterdam after a short hop from Lisbon, traversing the chaotic airport terminals and then sitting in the dark, wedged between the two other biggest blokes on the flight to Nairobi, I felt some of that perspective returning.
At the very least, it gave me some quiet reflective time to think about what we’ve done, how far we’ve come and what we’ve still got left to do.
The workload has been relentless – my precious early morning thinking hours to write blogs and podcasts have been cut short before 8am when workers and machines arrive and the firefighting begins.
The days are long and we have been using the light and the time; bedtimes are early, but bodies are sore and minds are busy.
To-do lists are copied from one notebook to another as plans are wrecked by water leaks or unexpected requirements.
Extra screws for the patio covers, materials to order, emergency trips for vital components … more things to do than we have time for in a day or even to get through in a week.
It really is one of the most difficult and stressful things we have ever done, but the hardest part is managing all the things that are out of our control.
And the process of licensing bureaucracy is certainly out of our control.
Many different people are telling us many different things about how a changing process works – what we need and what we don’t need.
Expensive acoustic inspections, energy certificates that could take a year, six months or just a couple of weeks … depending on who you ask.
We pushed hard for our final architecture project to be submitted, but it wasn’t accurately done. Now it has been withdrawn and re-submitted.
The list of things left to do is overwhelming, but with skilled friends staying to help, we have sealed some concrete floors and installed all the wooden bathroom sink tops and bowls.
Slowly but surely the electricals, the metalworks and the water system are being completed.
Even a beautiful Portuguese paradise can become a millstone of pressure and worry.
But returning to Africa, meeting some Ethiopian journalists who live their lives in fear of the police knocking on their door in the night, helps bring some perspective.
I’ve been doing some work helping to train journalists in countering disinformation and that’s what brought me to very different Nairobi.
A vast concrete overpass – the lauded Expressway – now flies above the city.
It took just a few years to build … a little more than our few houses.
High-rise buildings have sprung up, development is everywhere … but so is protest – five years on, different voices are now being silenced by the same water cannon, riot police and teargas that were so familiar back then that I owned a gas mask.
This time the voices of the young are facing down a tumult of new taxes, and a few days after I left, the authorities opened fire: 50 people have died so far, according to Kenya’s human rights commission.
An embattled President Ruto backed down, sacked most of his ministers and the empowered protesters have been pressing for his resignation.
It’s an important point in Kenya’s history and an important reminder of the big world out there beyond our little valley with our very individual problems.
It’s a world I stepped back from, but an important one to engage with to keep perspective.
There are books waiting to be read, there are beaches ready to be visited, there’s calm to be restored and chaos to be tamed.
Balance needs to come back into our lives – we need to be running this, and not letting it run (or ruin) us.
It’s time for a reset, a plan, a strategy … to be ready for guests as soon as we can and to get ourselves rested and ready for them.
After all, this is just the beginning of something that will never be finished but will just get better and better.
ALASTAIR LEITHEAD is a former BBC foreign correspondent now living off the grid in rural Alentejo. We writes the blog “Off-grid and Ignorant in Portugal” here and produces the podcast Ana & Al’s Big Portuguese Wine Adventure on all the usual platforms.
