Auld Lang Syne - Jacksonville Edition

The most significant chapter of my life so far is coming to a close. We've been in Jacksonville for more than 8 years now, and in a few short weeks, we'll be moving to Saint Paul to start over. Jacksonville is the only real home our kids have known, and we've made so many dear, dear friends here over the years. We moved here in the summer of 2016. Seven months later, just after the New Year, just before Trump's first inauguration, I wrote the following:

Reading these words again during our final weeks in Jacksonville hit me pretty hard. We are, once again, crossing the country, looking to put down roots, leaving torn ones in the ground behind us, trying to find that feeling of “settled.” There are things that are different with this move, things that could result in more of a settling: we bought a house that perhaps could be home for the next twenty years, we'll have family close by, and, in a strange convergence of fate, the Twin Cities has the greatest concentration of people we know outside of Texas and Florida. But we're also trading hot, sticky summers, where you either go to the beach or stay inside, for a frigid winter, where you either cross country ski and snowshoe or stay inside. Will we be able to settle amid shoveling snow and subzero real-feels in a region not necessarily known for welcoming outsiders? Will we find our people?

Also, this time I'm forty. As my birthday approached this year, I didn't think I'd feel any different on the other side—my birthday is often a bit of a nothing-burger to me. I was taken by surprise, then, when I did feel some pangs of both nostalgia and excitement. I remember my dad turning forty, remember going to his twenty-year high school reunion, milestones which are both behind me now. Did he feel settled then? But then I also remember all the years since he turned forty: his adventures to National Parks, to Europe and South America; the learning and the unlearning he's done; his kids going off to college, some getting married, one having kids of his own. And so I grow excited for the “second half” of my life. So much of our youth is spent in a funny cocktail of ignorance and energy, and I wouldn't trade in the somewhat quieter, hopefully more mature life I live now. I look forward to being more present to the future than I was to the past.

As I wrote in my reflection from 2017, the New Year has always been the most emotional holiday for me. It houses the perfect little irony: a relatively arbitrary marker in time used to signify a before and an after, the only real difference being the first few weeks in January when we end up scratching out the old year and rewriting the new one. But despite its somewhat performative nature, the invitation to reflect on the past and to hope for the future has a tendency to center me as I try to reimagine my regrets and be thankful for the chance to start again. The irony being that it's just one moment that, really, could be any moment at all if I just stopped to think about it like that. But instead I shoot “Auld Lang Syne” into my veins every year and love it.

Nietzsche has a great aphorism about our past leading to our present. He says, imagine a demon coming to curse you and force you to relive your life exactly as you have, over and over, making the same mistakes and reliving the same pains and joys, indefinitely repeated with no chance to change a thing. Would you fall on the ground and wail, he asks, or have you ever had a moment when you would have told the demon, “You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine”? Accepting the present for what it is means accepting the past for what it was. For you to be alive, here, now, just like this, all the little things that happened just so in your life, had to have happened just so—pain, joy, trauma, moments cherished, and moments lost.

I've been thinking about that feeling: “settled”. I've chased some sense of security, some “okay-ness” with my life that always seems just out of reach, just in the future, just after New Years. But if I'm being honest with myself, if I let my inner Buddhist tell me what I know to be true, there's no such thing. Or, rather, feeling settled isn't about adding anything to or changing anything in my life. It's not about building relationships or spending a certain number of years in a certain place. It's simply about being where you already are.

Despite my inner Buddha, there are still things we're looking for, things worth moving for: feeling the earth breathe with her seasons, well funded and staffed good schools, real city parks, no more Ron Desantis or school boards where Moms for Liberty have a supermajority, bikeability, and a house we could love. There's a meditation center nearby and miles of trails through the woods that start mere miles from our front door. And the chance for the cousins to grow up together is priceless.

I'm sure there will be moments of regret—putting on too many layers to shovel snow in the dark and missing the friends on our street and those we've stayed connected to from our old neighborhood, just to name a few—but I'm looking forward to letting go of the ache to settle, and in just so doing, finally settle.