Courage To Leave Comfort: Moving to Oregon From Missouri

The time was right, we had to believe that

Thousands and thousands of my rides have started like this:

“What made you decide to move to Oregon?”

“Adventure,” I exclaim!

They persist sometimes, not satisfied by my off-the-cuff response. Some people ask, not because they want to fill the silence but because they genuinely want to know the answer.

When they press, I answer that it really was something as simple as a question. This guy we’d met in Springfield, MO, had moved to Oregon. One day on Facebook, he asked.

A Rhetorical Question

He was having to move because his landlord was selling the property he was renting. He was looking for roommates. The Pacific Northwest ain’t cheap.

We also had to move. Because our landlord was selling the property we were renting. We, on the other hand, we’re not looking for roommates. Southwest Missouri is cheap.

“Have you ever considered the Great Northwest?”

I had, but just briefly. My wife got accepted at The Art Institute of Seattle before we met. I would have followed her west. The asking price of the institute proved prohibitive.

I Knew How To Move

I was raised out East. New England, New Jersey, and New York, among other places. Formative years. I learned to relate to people back east. I grew up in a diverse population. My family moved around a lot. I grew into my surroundings. Adapt or perish.

I spent the middle of my life in the Midwest. In the buckle of the Bible Belt. Wide expanses that stretched for miles and miles. A largely conservative town. People who were sensitive to the differences of others. Especially those from someplace else.

I adapted to Southwest Missouri. I had learned to bloom where I was planted. I rationalized. I nestled neatly in. There in a comfortable state. There in a town that was barely 150,000.

Then One Day, It Began

My wife, Melissa, was scrolling and saw the post from the friend. The one who got out. She commented, and she tagged me, her partner, and her partner’s wife.

“Hey, guys! I think if we pooled our resources, we could do this!”

I’d moved around before. Nothing tying me down. “Sure, I’ll consider it.”

The next night? If you can believe it, that very next night we sat down to talk to Melissa’s partner and his wife. They were open to the idea but wanted to talk to their daughter. It turned out that she was open to the idea.

Like that, the ball was rolling.

Logistics

Of course, money was an issue. Of course, transportation was an issue. Of course, having-a-lifetime-of-belongings was an issue. We agreed on the why. We’d figure out the how.

We shared a conviction. The prospect of life out west promised more joy than the pain of staying in the Midwest. Now we had to make it happen.

74 Days. 5 Yard Sales. We sold everything we could. We donated the rest of it. We pared down to the minimum.

What could not be replaced? What would cost more to replace than move?

Budgeting, saving, prospecting, and planning. Melissa’s partner was the only one who had a transferable job. We didn’t find the place we’d move into until two weeks before the move. We would figure it out. On a wing and a prayer.

Maybe The Universe Did Conspire to Help

It was not without grace that things came together as they did. Not without a great deal of help. Money from a lost relative’s life insurance policy let Melissa find us a newer used car. We sold the cars we had to help finance the move.

A Leap of Faith

I’d been in Missouri for 22 years. Melissa was born and raised there. We were blessed to have a great many friends there.

I had always said if there are six degrees of separation between everyone on the planet? It felt like there were only two degrees of separation in Springfield. Everyone felt recognizable, either because you knew them or knew someone who did.

You learn things about a place, living there, that you don’t really learn any other way. The lay of the land. The short cuts. The flow of traffic and ways to predict it. The weather patterns. The nooks. The crannies. The restaurants to eat at and when to go. The happy hours and their bartenders.

Put together, these combined to help me know what to expect. Knowing what to expect minimized my anxiety. Minimized anxiety led to greater comfort.

Comfort from predictability led me to resist change. From that resistance, confirmation bias took over. My mind perceived reasons- many, many reasons- why things were good. Things were fine. Things can stay this way.

Why ask for more?

I Make a Good Argument

I also identified reasons why leaving was impractical. Not pragmatic. Impossible.

“Look at how easy it is to live here!”

“The cost of living is so low! It’s expensive to live in a bigger city! I’d have to work much harder in a bigger city. And it’s expensive to move,” I reminded myself every time I thought about moving away.

There’s a piece of dialogue in “My Dinner with Andre” where Andre Gregory notes that New York City is like a prison. The people there? Are both the jailers and the imprisoned.

“When you talk to people in the city, you find that many of them want to leave, and when you ask them why they haven’t, they tell you that they don’t know.”

I Said it So Much, I Believed It

I can’t tell you how many times I have told that story to people over the years. I talked about how hard life is in NYC, but I have nothing but the best memories from my time there.

I had an acting teacher tell the class to go out to NYC for Spring Break. “Not to see the shows, but to see how hard people are willing to work to make a buck!” I tell that story, too.

Through the lens of these stories, NYC feels like a distant, far-off place. A dream or nightmare that I could never achieve or wouldn’t want to achieve.

Through repeating these stories I reinforced them in my mind. I burned those neural pathways deeper and deeper. Like prayers, reinforced by their repetition.

The way I felt in the city when I lived there? The richness of life in the city? The family members I knew who lived there and loved it? These things were not in my consideration.

Perspective is reality. I thought that mine was one I had chosen. One that served me well.

Sometimes, It Works Like Magic

But then that guy asked that question on Facebook, and I was in the right place at the right time. If the magician says, “Abracadabra,” in the middle of his trick or from the opposite side of the stage away from his hat, the magic doesn’t happen.

Maybe it’s fairer to say that even though the magic may happen, our ability to perceive it is distorted. Because of either the time or the place.

When I go through the story with folks, I say that I don’t mean to say it was easy. We were really lucky. At every step of the way.

Something else I say is this: It’s funny how often luck follows hard work and determination and how rarely luck just plops down in your lap when you’re in your comfort zone.

In veritas, MW Mercer

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