Your Mom and I are making ourselves uncomfortable on purpose, which sounds like a terrible idea. It’s not, though, and I’m going to tell you why it’s good for us and good for you.
Late last summer, a recruiter contacted your Mom about a job. After lots of emails, phone calls, interviews, and soul searching, she decided to take a job as the VP of Sales at Sierra Nevada Brewing. This also meant we’d relocate from Cincinnati to Asheville. Which all sounds great, because who wouldn’t want to work for the brewery that started the craft beer industry and live in the mountains of North Carolina where they got married? And we’d be closer to my family. What could be uncomfortable about that?
You have to consider what we’re leaving behind.
Your Mom had worked at P&G for 17 years; and while every day had challenges (and new acronyms, so so many acronyms), it was a company she knew well full of people she’d worked with before. She had friends, mentors, mentees, and lots of people she cared about. Plus, she was really good at what she did.
It’s hard to underestimate the amount of comfort and familiarity you establish when you’ve been with an organization that long. That familiarity extends to the city of Cincinnati; we’ve been here long enough that we have friends we know and love, people that recognize us in the shops and businesses we frequent, and a routine we’ve established. We’ve made significant investments in our house; it’s a place we’re comfortable and happy. We joined a church and sent you to their preschool where you’ve made friends and have teachers we trust. That is all to say, we’ve made this city our home, and it’s a home we’ve grown accustomed to and comfortable in. We have a good life in Cincinnati.
We’re choosing to leave that comfort and familiarity behind. We’re selling this house and buying another. Your Mom took a job in an industry where she knew almost no one and we’re moving to a city where the same is true. Establishing herself in her new role has meant she’s had to travel all over the country these past few months. And she’s had to learn a whole bunch of new shit. You’ll start a new preschool the week after we move without any of the three rotating best friends you’ve made this year. (Every day you have a new favorite color and a different one of three boys is your best friend, but you are four, so that’s pretty normal.)
Anyway.
Change is hard, changing everything all at once is harder. As we’ve prepared to move, bought a house, and searched for preschools, your Mom and I have both struggled. We’ve felt anxious and stressed. From getting the electricity turned on at our new house to finding a new babysitter for you, there’s a never-ending list of things to do. She’s missed being at home with us and we’ve missed having her here. It hasn’t been easy, and it won’t be like flipping a switch once we get there; in Find Yourself Somewhere New I wrote about how it takes two or three years to really feel at home in a city, and I don’t expect Asheville to be any different.
Why, then, are we choosing to be uncomfortable? Why are we stepping into discomfort that may last years when we were perfectly safe and comfortable here?
Because we believe that after the discomfort passes, our lives (and yours), will be better for it. Your Mom is going to kill it at Sierra Nevada. I know she is. She took a leadership position in an industry that’s still predominantly male, and is helping a purpose-driven company become more inclusive in their thinking and hiring. Asheville offers untold opportunities for hiking, kayaking, mountain biking, and outdoor recreation. It’s also beautiful. We’re going to make friends there and so will you. Not to replace the ones we have here, but to add to our circle. We’ll make unknown faces into familiar ones and our new house into a home. I know this because we’ve done it before, and as hard as it seems now, we’ll do it again.
I can picture it in my head and it looks awesome.
What’s there to be afraid of? Well, it will be hard. That’s for sure. And as optimistic as I am, things might not work out like we want them to. Asheville might suck. Your Mom might hate selling beer and we might struggle to make friends. (Although, in my one shot at Cincinnati, if you can make friends here, where everyone wants to know where you went to high school, you can make friends anywhere.)
The other choice would be choosing comfort over change, not taking risks because we let the short-term discomfort scare us away from what could be. And being perfectly honest, it’s always going to be what could be, not what 100% will be.
The point is that it’s okay to be anxious, to worry, and to feel discomfort. Change is uncomfortable and the unknown is scary. But for me, and for your Mom, what’s not okay is to not try. We had this dream of what things could be, and what it could be for you, and we wanted to make it actually happen. So as much as it pains us to leave the sweet, humid, sweaty embrace of this city of sausage by the river, we’re going to do just that.
Don’t read this as some kind of diatribe against Cincinnati, or people who never leave the city they grew up in; it’s not that. For some people, that’s their dream.
It’s advice, for you. If you avoid hard things like discomfort, change, and challenges, you’ll have a lukewarm life. Things will forever be just okay, not amazing, not awful, but just okay. For me and your Mom, that’s not good enough. My hope is that you feel the same way.
Take on hard things. Embrace the pucker. Choose discomfort.
It will make you stronger, and while you won’t always win, your life will be richer for having tried and your victories will be sweeter for having struggled.
Because living a lukewarm life means never knowing if you could have made your dreams come true. And it definitely means never cracking a beer on the patio with your parents at the brewery where your Mom works after spending a day home from college mountain biking with your Dad. And maybe if we’re lucky, we can get Mom to come biking too.
I love you,
Dad
I originally planned to finish this series in twelve months, intending to write one entry a week for 52 weeks. But, other things came up and I didn’t have as much time as I thought I would. We moved, you started a new school, I had other projects, etc. But finally, I’m starting my last entry in September, nine months after I’d planned. Which is the perfect intro to this one.
Time is funny like that. It marches on like a metronome, indifferent to how much you wish it would slow down or speed up. It offers no do-overs, no matter how frivolously you spend it. And it gives zero fucks what you planned to accomplish in the time you had. Once that time is over, you’ll get no more. But, it also stretches out ahead of you into an unknown future, offering untold possibility and infinite choices.
Which is why I hope you both learn to make choices about how you spend your time and understand what those choices mean. Because while there’s never enough time for everything, there’s still enough time to do almost anything.