Moving every two years or so can be really painful — but it helps to reinforce some key life lessons
As I write this, my family and I are stuck in a hotel room at the midpoint of another permanent change of station (PCS) move. I have been in the military for my entire adult life — literally longer than I wasn’t, at this point. Since the age of 18 I have never lived in the same place for longer than two years. Since getting married my wife and I have moved 7 times; our kids (6 and 5) have moved five and three times, respectively. The last two have been overseas locations in very different parts of the world. It’s surely a difficult thing, moving. The stress is extreme, it dislocates everything you know as a family, and can be awfully hard to say goodbye to the amazing places we’ve lived. That said, the amazing opportunity to experience living with such different people in so many different places is really something I don’t think you could ever replicate. In twenty some-odd years of this business I’ve gotten to live in four different states (and a city — DC), five different countries, and spent time in thirtysomething other countries and probably twenty five or so other states, and our family has been together for many (most) of them. Is it worth it? I don’t know, but there’s definitely a lot of good that comes from such broadly varied experiences. If nothing else, I think our family has internalized three big lessons (and a whole lot of smaller ones that we probably don’t even realize) from these opportunities.
Discussing these lessons with my family, they seem so obvious as to be banal. Maybe that’s the case, but it nonetheless seems useful to write them down. In a time when even basic decency often seems under threat in America (or maybe I just spend too much time looking at the cesspool that is Twitter…), we try to remind ourselves of these lessons with some regularity (and the Military helps out by moving us a whole lot).
What is the most important thing I think we’ve learned from living in so many different places with so many different people? It has to be the importance of the “golden rule.” People aren’t inherently good or bad — ultimately we’re more or less just a bunch of smart monkeys — and it sure seems like the best way to live life in a modern society is to assume that most folks are just doing the best they can as normal, flawed humans. Using this as a going in stance makes it pretty easy to then treat them like you’d want to be treated —assuming the most favorable interpretation of actions until proven otherwise. Sure, some people are happy to screw other people over, but in our family’s limited experience those people are fewer than you might expect. Life sure seems to be better when you assume everyone is generally decent unless they show that not to be true. Perhaps most so because instead of suspicion and mistrust, the default can then be to treat folks the way you’d hope they treat you.
Next is a principle from Buddhism — take care of yourself before trying to fix others. Humans have an almost infinite ability to want to tell other people how they ought to live, something that is often exceedingly common in neighborhoods and communities all over the world. It’s a natural human tendency to want to make a place conform to your own expectations or desires after settling there; one thing moving from community to community has taught our family in the last few years, however, is that each place always has its own unique norms — whether large or small. This held as true in our move from Virginia to Bahrain as it did moving from Vista, CA to Oceanside, CA (about an 8 mile difference). As a general rule, when moving into a new place, we generally try to focus on getting our own house in order — we try to make sure we’re doing things right and treating other people around us well — before ever worrying about the way everyone else around us lives. Assimilation into a new place is hard, but trying to live as a part of the community has always been worthwhile for us. It’s almost impossible to assimilate and enjoy the new place without having things in order at home first.
In that vein, the last lesson we’ve learned is that resilience is king. Moving to a new place (and most of life in general) never goes as planned or expected. Sure, sometimes it’s close to what you thought it would be like, but more often it’s not. Even moving back to a place we thought we knew almost always ends up with changes and unique situations that we hadn’t expected. Minimizing the let down when our expectation is unmet or something turns out different than hoped for is the project of a lifetime to be sure, yet is something we practice as much as possible. For our family, the resilience of being able to deal with unmet expectations is often really hard to cultivate, but is such a hugely important life skill when moving from place to place with only a very limited understanding of the local conditions before we get there. The flexibility to roll with the punches and take things as they are — not as we feel like they ought to be — is something our family tries very hard to live (sometimes with pretty mediocre results, but at least we try). There’s obviously nothing wrong by trying to improve a situation, and we certainly do that, but it has been crucial to our happiness as we move to unknown places to try to take things on their own merits.
Moving is hard: every. single. time. Because it is, the silver lining of new places and people is something that is just too easy to forget as it gets subsumed into the larger malaise of fast food, sleeping in strange places, and plane rides. Our family has absolutely taken more from each place we lived and the people who were there with us than they took from us. We have learned, and continue to learn, new lessons every place we go — and I hope that each of the three “big lessons” mentioned above stay with us whether we continue moving every two years or if we decide on a “forever home.” Treating others as you’d wish to be treated, worrying about keeping your own house in order before judging and telling other folks how they ought to live, and trying to cultivate resiliency and the ability to cope when expectations are not met are principles we will try to live by for the rest of our days.
