Where to Live
There are three considerations that have more impact on our lives than any others. We cannot choose when we live as that is the role of the dice we call procreation, whether you believe in the human soul or reincarnation or whatever. I suppose some people can determine actively or passively through their lifestyle choices, how long they live, but that is a very different issue. The other three considerations are the obvious ones. Why we live is a bit too existential for a Saturday morning scribbling session and would quickly devolve into that age-old pondering of the philosophical issues thrown on the table by Rene Descartes that if we think therefore we are. I will not delve into the how we live question for two reasons. First of all, it is ethically judgmental and simply too similar to the Descartes question, and, more importantly to my simplistic mind, it does not start with a W and I am all about W’s this morning. That leaves us with Who we choose to live with (please take note of the double W or, I suppose, the Quad-U to carry the double-U theme to the squared extreme). Who we gather and conduct our lives with has a great deal to do with kismet and perhaps some quotient of karma, but it also has some large degree of choice attached to it. We, indeed, do choose our friends and mostly choose our families if we define family in the traditional nuclear sense as opposed to the less voluntary extended sense, moving downward rather than upward on the family tree, since I’m sure you will agree that trees grow from the roots upward and do not cascade downward in a progenitorial sense.
That leaves (note the segue from the tree analogy) the issue of where to live as perhaps the biggest voluntary choice of our lives and it is fraught with many variables for contemplation. We all start someplace. Some have the deeply-rooted establishment of their sedentary forefathers to guide them. Our family has lived here forever is as strong a magnet as any. Heritage is comfort and a strong sense of belonging and everyone wants to belong. But for every person driven by constancy of place, there is another driven and equally compelled by wanderlust for a new place. When you wander there is sometimes a reason to keep moving, the most notable being that Rolling Stones gather no moss and moss seems to be a bad thing to have attached to you though the trees of the forest seem to flourish with their moss and lichen. I guess that means that moss works for the sedentary and not so much for the wanderers. Most people probably fall in between deeply rooted and totally footloose. They are willing to move, but have to think through all the implications to see how it all fits them, their coterie and their lifestyle.
Everybody I know who is at or near our age goes through some version of this search for where they want to live. And many of them make every kind of mistake possible. Some say they want to move to the resort town where they had such a great vacation (always suspect due to merging vacation sentiment with where you want to reside sentiment). Some move for the weather and that sometimes works well and sometimes wears thin. Some move for a modest cost of living and some move for a cultural agenda that suits their wishes for who they wish they were, but may not really be after a while. The point is that we all use a wide range of criteria that seem at the moment to be relevant to us and then lo and behold, our thinking or priorities change for one reason or another. The more unconstrained we are in our pocketbook, the chances are the more flighty we get about things not perfectly meeting our expectations of the moment and therefore trying to fix things by moving to someplace that works better for us.
I am generally a believer that we should move for relationships rather than physical aspects of place, but even that may not be a constant enough aspect of our lives to be the right call. It is unmistakable that many people prefer more warm weather and to avoid cold and dreary weather the older they get. We sometimes regret the loss of the seasons, but that is more a loss of change per se than a loss of warmth and sunshine. And as for relationship-driven locating, those things change more than we want to think they will. Parents get infatuated with grandkids and being close to their children, right up until they get put upon for childcare more than they like. Kids think built-in babysitters might be great until the parental “guidance” overwhelms them. I have never believed that strong family ties are a function of daily involvement. Remember Everybody Loves Raymond? Bad idea. I think a little bit of absence and distance absolutely makes the heart grow fonder. You can care and stay involved without being physically all over one another. Friendships also change as interests change as we age. Retirement really can be a very different lifestyle and that can really make you a very different person. It doesn’t mean you need to discard your long-term friends, but it may mean that making some new friends at the Pickleball Courts or wherever may be a better fit for you in the here and now and seeing your great old friends for a shared vacation or a dinner may be a good way to recapture your good time memories together even if those memories are less likely to be what you are each about today. I think all of that says to me that we have to be very careful about choosing where we live as we get older and perhaps not be afraid to take an approach that is different than the norm. Coming from New York means that most of our friends headed toward Florida and that would have been a bad choice for us on many levels.
Remember when the big city trip on Bonanza for the Ponderosa’s Cartwright clan was for Pa, Adam, Hoss and Little Joe to go into the exotic stream of San Francisco nightlife? It sure beat Virginia City in the High Sierra of Northwestern Nevada. But apparently, the area suits our friends that retired there less than they had hoped. That is no surprise for me since we haven’t been buyers of the City on the Bay for a number of years. When we did our search back in 2011, the range under consideration was from San Francisco down to San Diego with the three leading contenders being Santa Barbara and Montecito, Laguna Beach and San Diego County from Fallbrook down to Rancho Santa Fe. We landed on this hilltop as the place we wanted to perch in our dotage. We never seriously considered the L.A. Basin (which I define as ranging from Ventura County down through Orange County) due to the constant traffic obstacles, so both Santa Barbara and San Diego were the two leading contenders. Ultimately, we chose San Diego County for the weather and the proximity to a bigger city and its airport. Santa Barbara strikes me as more remote, but I am sure if I was private jet rich I might feel differently. Then it came down to the house and property itself and we feel we got lucky to find such a winner at a more than reasonable price. We closed immediately.
So today, we all got onto Zillow and Trulia and did what we have come to know as watching real estate porn by looking at properties for fun. What that all did for me was to remind me of how lucky or brilliant we were in finding this place. I know there will likely come a day when we will, by some necessity or other, need to move away and leave our hilltop behind. Nothing is ever forever. But I doubt we will ever stop liking this place with its views and setting (especially the gardens). We choose to love where our hearts and minds of the moment tell us what’s right and knowing where to live is about knowing who you are.