Changing Places
It’s a week before my 73rd birthday. I’ve been thinking about aging, and about the impact of moving from Palo Alto to Hartwick at 69, from Hartwick to Pleasant Hill at 72, and then Pleasant Hill to Cooperstown at 75. I think these moves are good for me in a lot of ways. Moving from one world to another invites reflection – what changes, what doesn’t change; what matters, what doesn’t. Moving necessitates changing routines, changing relationships, changing perspectives. This seems like a good time in my life to shake things up a little, to look at what I care about, to think about what I want more of and what I want less of.
It’s an incredible luxury to move voluntarily. For the people fleeing Afghanistan or all the other terribly troubled places in the world, moving, if they are lucky enough to be able to move, must be frightening and deeply wrenching. I can’t imagine being forced to choose between a home that has become unlivable and a life in exile from the home I have loved. When we moved to Hartwick we were only moving three time zones away from people we loved. We wouldn’t risk death to go back to visit. We wouldn’t need visas. There were new things to learn in Hartwick, but they didn’t include a new language, a new currency, or a new form of government. If I were making these moves under duress, I imagine it would be a lot harder to see them as stimulating.
But as it is, I do find the moves stimulating, the two we’ve completed, to New York and back, and the third we are thinking about all the time. Because we have returned to such familiar territory, this move doesn’t feel temporary despite being limited. We have family we can easily see in person again. We have our dear chavurah, and for me, weekly mah jongg games and visits. We have great Mexican food and Piazza’s Market. We live close enough to dear friends in the East Bay for last minute plans for dinner. We don’t have to calculate the time difference to make California calls. There are so many people here we care about. There’s the rich diversity we love. And there is the beautiful, familiar landscape.
The stress of driving in traffic was so distracting when we first returned here that I couldn’t pay much attention to the world alongside the freeways. But now I’m more used to seeing the world at 70 miles per hour, and to traffic that suddenly goes from 70 to 15 for no apparent reason. So I can look again at the beautiful hills and canyons, and at the amazing Bay. For all the density of human habitation here, there are also huge stretches of protected open land. You can see them on a map, the big expanses with no roads and no towns. On Google Maps these open areas are green, but in real life they are tawny in the dry summer, dotted with dark green oaks, each creating its own island of shade. Turkey vultures and hawks circle in open sky. The Bay is crowded with huge cargo ships up near the busy ports of Oakland and San Francisco, but where the long San Mateo Bridge crosses it, it is mostly sailed only by seagulls. Cormorants perched on the transmission line towers spread their wings to dry in the sun and wind. For all the changes humans have made, a lot of the natural world is still visible.
These are the big constants for me that the moves bring into sharp focus, the presence of people I love and the richness of the natural world. I miss the people and countryside I left behind in Otsego County, but I have the pleasure of being back with people I’ve missed, in countryside I’ve missed. Probably the weakest part of my brain is the part that deals with spatial relations, so having to deal with different streets and different rooms gives me a little exercise that I imagine is good for me. All the changes are stimulating. All of them help me notice my insides and outsides, help me think about who I am becoming in the bonus years after my three score and ten. I’m so blessed to have the luxury of not needing to do much, of being able to just enjoy being. Every week we open the Al-anon meeting with a prayer for serenity, and 40 years of praying for it have brought me more than my share of it. Moving hasn’t been unsettling, it’s shown me how settled I am wherever I am.