Before and after the move
I have begun to notice that many of my thoughts are beginning to rotate around the date of my move from Utah to Boston. There are the events that took place before the move and those that take place since the move. Nothing that crosses over between the two seems to matter, much, to me. It either happened before or after. Not during.
During that period of time when I was moving it was all about those four days on the road. I was in the truck with Andy. We drove. Occasionally we stopped because Debbie and the girls needed to stop. But in the long run, it was about being on the road for twelve hours a day for four days. They were long, not necessarily comfortable, and in the end I was happy to see the 2500 miles of road behind us. That was during the move.
Before the move I planned, prepared, scoped, looked, thought, prayed, and did whatever else was appropriate or necessary, within my purview of this change, to prepare for life on the Right coast - this is the East coast for those who look at a map and can't adjust to left and right. The Left coast is the Pacific, the Right is the Atlantic. My thoughts were centered on how this would affect those around me, the reasons I was moving, the reasons I'd gotten to this point, constantly asking "why" in relation to the move, and several other variations related to family and friends. It never really occurred to me that the move itself might prove to be difficult.
But moving is difficult. I am beginning to believe that it doesn't really matter whether you move with a caravan of people, family included, or you move alone. There are changes that have to take place. You have to gather around you new people, make new contacts, struggle for new opportunities, and in the end make decisions based off of notions that may, or may not, be acceptable within the new purview that you find yourself in. In my case, I'd never been to Boston before and making the decision to move here, to accept that this was the right change for me, to do that as a part of my 'new' life was a little overwhelming. In essence, I'd decided to change everything about who I was for some notion of what I might become. So I packed up my things, gave a lot of my stuff away, stored my books (which proved to be very hard for me) and relocated to a new part of the world. It is, I'd imagine, like the pioneers or Saints as they left what was familiar for what was completely unfathomable in the west. Except, in my case, I was leaving what was comfortable for what I thought was going to be a cake walk.
This is not to say that I am naive enough to believe that this whole affair wasn't going to require changes and adaptations. Both have been taking place; both have been occurring; both will continue to occur. I meet people all of the time and one observer (thanks Larry) suggested that I have a tendency to have interesting people around me all of the time. I don't know how true that is, though I guess I can see the interesting persons that have been in my life - or some of them, but I do know that sometimes relying upon the observations of friends and relatives to get a better handle of a situation has some wisdom in it.
One of things that have happened to me is that I have become a little melancholy toward the loss of so many good friends. I left them all behind because I knew that it was time for me to move. That knowledge hasn't change, though my internal timeframe isn't the same as a realistic timeframe I guess, but I miss my family and I miss my friends. I can call them. That's true. But what I want is to be able to jump in a car and drive to a house and just hang out. That's not been a reality since getting here. I don't own a car and just the other day it occurred to me that one of the best solutions to malaise was to put on clothes, grab my backpack, and walk to the store. The store, just so you know, is about four or five miles away. So, I walked to the store. It felt great until I was about halfway back to the house I am living in with Andy and Debbie and their two girls, then my legs started to rebel and the sickness that had kept me at home the day before started to flair up and the result was that I started to feel the change all around me.
Not feeling well is definitely not one of those things you want to have happen when everything else around you is in a rapid state of flux. And I have not been feeling all that well. Different parts of my life feel as though they have been ripped from my hands and that is never a positive feeling. It's a rather negative one. Yet, as I contemplate and fight the temptation to give into impulse and the ease of returning to what is comfortable, I find there is an amount of comfort in knowing that I made this decision for the right reasons. The changes that take place, they take place after the move. I grow, after the move. I meet new people, after the move. Everything that is happening to me, right now, is happening after the move. And it will continue to do so.