Impermanence

Some people are itinerant, by nature or by circumstance, moving around from place to place. That has never been me. Through the confluence of opportunity and personality, I ended up living my entire conscious life in the Boston area. It’s not that I was ever opposed to moving, it’s just that the best opportunities were always the ones close by, and I never felt the itch to go somewhere new. I’ve never wanted to move for the sake of moving.

Which is why it feels strange for me to say that I’m moving to San Francisco for at least a year. A great opportunity came up through work, and I accepted. On the surface, it’s no big deal. People move all the time. Things change.

But somehow, change seems scarier as you get older. It feels odd to leave Boston now, in ways it wouldn’t have when I was younger. When you’re young, change is the natural of state of things: you change grades every year, meet new classmates, go off to college. You grow, change, and your world, with all the choices yet to be made, is wide open.

But as you get older, you decide things. You make choices and some semblance of permanence seeps in. You choose a profession, you choose a partner, you make a home, and along the way, your old home becomes the place where you grew up. You settle down. Change still happens, but to quote from The Matrix “Some things change, and some things don’t.” In some ways, getting older is the act of deciding what things you don’t want to change.

After spending all of my post-college years in Boston, I had assumed that Boston would never change for me, that this was to be my place of permanence. I grew up here, I have family here, I have friends here. To move somewhere else, even temporarily, where I have no presence is unsettling. Sure, it’s exciting, but sad as well, a reminder that things change, even things we thought wouldn’t. A move is a death and a birth at the same time - the reminder that nothing is permanent, that things end, but also that there are new places and new people. So the world moves on and so will I. If all goes as planned, I’ll be back in a year, but as as John Lennon once said, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

California, here I come.