Moving cross country with young children is the smartest dumbest thing I've ever done (#32)
Celebrating 5 years since we moved
My wife had been lobbying me to move with her back to her adopted hometown of Seattle since we had first started dating. Her attempts at persuading me to move looked something like this:
December 2014 — “Isn’t Seattle great?!?” “Um no this place sucks in December”
December 2015 — “That cold air sticks around until June! Wanna move here?” “Hard pass”
December 2016 — “My mom makes this great potato casserole and if we move here we can have it anytime we want?” “Enticing but no”
August 2017 — “Isn’t it great being in the middle of Lake Washington on a nice August day, bobbing in the water, boating between places to have drinks?” “Oh my god yes yes yes let’s move”
You might think I’m exaggerating but that’s pretty much much how it went down. 5 months later in February 2018 (5 years ago almost to the day), we moved to Seattle.
How do you slow time down?
I was recently listening to an Armchair Expert podcast episode where the guest was Scott Galloway. The episode was primarily about raising young boys, something I don’t really have to think about all that much. But a short bit at the end of the episode really grabbed my attention. Dax Shepard raised the point of “slowing time down” as we age. Anyone approaching mid life (or anyone who may have already slipped over to the other side of life’s bell curve) can totally relate to this. And if you have young children, there is no doubt that you’ve said more than once “they grow up so fast!”. The most annoying of cliches happens to be one of the truest ones.
Galloway and Shepard go back and forth on this point talking about how they attempt to slow down time. Galloway mentioned that he and his family had recently moved from Miami to London, partly as a way to jolt their system and provide new experiences, new things to see, new people to meet. He says:
“So when you're a five-year-old everything's changing every day you know, everything stands out and everything feels different. And then you get into kind of a road routine as you get older, you get set to get comfortable and you do kind of the same things professionally, personally, same person same mate, same situation and time just starts flying so I'm trying to mix it up.
Everything from mixing up my workouts to moving to London.
I thought, okay, that’ll be different if you live in two cities over 20 years, it slows time down as opposed to living in one city over 20 years”
And it hit me. We moved to Seattle mostly to be closer to family, partly for better work (for my wife), but, if we’re being honest, also for something new. We could have stayed in Atlanta where we had a wonderful network of friends, good jobs, a cool house in a neat neighborhood, and an impressive knowledge of where to get the best cheese dip in the city. But that routine, the sameness of everything, acted almost as an accelerant of time.
Now that I’m on my 31st edition of Dad Stories, an overarching theme is starting to emerge (to me anyway). It’s that I really want to enjoy (and catalog) as much of parenting as I can. I want to make sure my experiences with my kids are unique to them and to me. Experiencing new shit with my kids is the most amazing part of parenting.
I write all of this as I sit in dreary Seattle, cold and rainy / snowy (the worst combination of precipitation there is). It’s presently 80 degrees in Atlanta and if my Instagram stories are to be believed, at roughly this time 5 years ago I was sitting on the patio of a Mexican restaurant enjoying a margarita. And you know what? I couldn’t be happier that we moved.