Decision with Precision

Do we stay or do we go?  Some people make decisions with precision, weigh the pros and cons, list them side-by-side and decide.  We are not one of those people.

One of the first indicators that a transcontinental move was a possibility was when they wanted me to come visit.  Not born and bred but pretty dyed in the wool Northern Californian, leaving one of Mother Earth's garden paradises is not something I had ever considered.  Wherever I have traveled, no matter how beautiful, I have always viewed the approach to San Francisco airport with such a sense of gratitude that this is where I live.  One trip home, coming over the polar route on a particularly clear day, I started excitedly calling out landmarks on our approach, "There's San Pablo Bay!" "There's Mt. Tamalpious!"  "There's the Golden Gate Bridge!" "There's the Sutro Tower!" There's the spouse slinking down in his seat like he doesn't know me. It is with genuine sense of great good fortune to fly into the vista of ocean, bay, hills, and landmarks, sometimes green, sometimes golden, and know it as home.

So, a visit to the Midwest.  For more than 30 years the spouse had lived in my backyard, near my family.  If this is what he wanted to consider, it was his turn to have input into where we lived. The absolute best I could do was to promise to go with an open mind.  Telling myself that people live all over the world, and live happily too, I braced myself to not be braced.  This is no easy thing to attempt.  One year, thinking I was missing out on good old Catholic guilt, I decided to give up something for Lent: being judgmental.  It was one of the hardest things I have ever done; I do not think I am a particularly judgmental person, but just try not judging the woman who cuts you off in traffic while talking on the cell phone and applying mascara, try not judging the person in front of you who decides he wants to pay in pennies then makes the cashier check that every coupon was applied and questions the price of half the items on the receipt. Some people cry out for judgement.  An open non-judgmental mind is hard to attain; the following year I did not even attempt it but gave up speeding instead.  Sadly, that was a failure too.

Before the visit, my mother added her two cents by saying, "You know it's flat and there's no ocean," which proved to be true.  What also proved to be true was that the people were so very nice.  There were a couple of homes we looked at that I could, if I really squinted, see us living in.  The bouquet of flowers and the gourmet gift basket that greeted us in our hotel room helped, but I think the sight that captured my maybe-people-can-live-happily-here imagination was seeing a number of elderly people attending a music concert.  I thought, they did not move away immediately as they retired but stayed in the community.  Having a great performing arts center helped too.

I did not reject the idea out of hand as a result of our visit, but we returned home with a job offer and absolutely no certainly as to a course of action.  We launched a cacophony of difficulties and barriers, both to staying and to leaving.  What about this, what about that? When you are worrying about the logistics of moving a cat, without having made the decision to make a move at all, there is far too much distracting noise to reach a decision.  To make matters worse, we were absolutely silent about this save my mother and daughter so could not even talk it over with others.  Perhaps that is for the best, unless they had recently moved a cat.

We went to visit my daughter, and upon leaving my husband asked my mother, "What do you think?"  She unselfishly gave him a hug and said, "I would miss you terribly, but change is good."  It was  permission to do this, should we decide. 

We spoke about it endlessly during the trip, but always with the distractions of how will we do this rather than shall we do this.  Every meal, every outing, with our daughter or on our own, this was the recurring topic of conversation.  Finally, I said "Enough!  Let's make a decision, and if we decide to do it, figure out how to do it. Let's stop figuring out how before we know if."

My daughter gave encouragement, my mother had given permission, and I gave an open mind.  On the last day we were given to accept or decline, we made our decision and emailed it from Berlin.

And now, we had to figure out how.