What is it about overcast days?
We've made a big family decision to move across the country. It is both terrifying and exciting, with new opportunities and regret that those opportunities aren't here where we are. I thought for most of the past week about the idea that we're leaving something stable and secure and constant. And that is true. Where we live now is comfortable. Traffic is light. Things are generally not crowded. It does not feel like the rat race is ever present in our lives. And of course that's the downside too, which we've known all along. Maybe it's just a bit too easy, not challenging enough. There aren't enough opportunities. It's a bit of a backwater, “a nice place to live” nonetheless.
I've had in my head this notion that our time here has been stable and comfortable. But that's really not true. I've gone through a career change and a half, major health crises— the stuff of life. What has been easy and comfortable about it has been that it's relatively affordable. Things are relatively close. It feels understandable. There can be emptiness and solitude when needed, or people to engage with when called for. And I fear going back to crowded, because I remember a time when that caused me pain. I have largely lived through and worked through those issues. Or, maybe the voice says, have you really? Or did you just live somewhere for a while where it wasn't an issue?
We never thought we'd stay here more than five years. Ten would have been absurd. Fifteen or more? Completely unthinkable. This was never our forever home. And we still feel like outsiders, or rather, that we're never going to be truly at home here. There's some bit of distance, where we're interlopers on other people's land. I don't know why that is. It could jut be the regionalism of the country, and the way that neither of us grew up in this region. neither of us has roots or connections within a thousand miles. It's the place we've lived the longest and it is familiar and comfortable and easy now, but it's not really home as a place. And we wonder, why does it feel that way?
And then the thought of leaving brings terror. Will we look back and think that we didn't appreciate how good we had it. I'd like to think that we would take the best of the place and let it continue in our lives.
Life goes on. I worry that the body's aches and pains are, as in every hypochondriac's nightmares, not merely minor conditions of age but precursors of a turn for the worse. Now is no time to be running across the country. The unknown teases with its possibilities and terrors.
I feel like I've spent too much time thinking through the future. Wasted too much of my waking hours considering what others will think, what tomorrow will bring.
What is it about overcast days? Some mornings lie more heavily than others.