“Are you familiar with Schrödinger?” Aziz asks. He leans back on his couch and raises an eyebrow, clutching a cup of hot tea to his chest.
The old man is wearing a down jacket and a padded vest on top of it. His apartment is chilly, but he prefers to keep the heat down. I don’t question him. It’s a rainy night, typical of Decembers in Vancouver. The city is warm by Canadian standards, but if you’ve ever lived in the Pacific Northwest, you know that winters here have a certain bone-chilling quality.
“Of course I know Schrödinger. The cat,” I note.
“No, he was not a cat. He was a physicist.”
I try not to laugh. Aziz has misunderstood my reference to Erwin Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment. If you saw Aziz on the street, you would see an elderly man. Below the surface, though, he’s anything but old. Last night, he got home at 2:00 after working late into the night.
He continues, “Schrödinger supported an interpretation of waves without particles. This brought him into conflict with his colleagues. Christopher Columbus was rejected because he believed he could go to the east by sailing west. Gallileo was rejected by both the church and his fellow scientists, who persecuted him for his support of heliocentrism in an age of geocentrism. It is in our nature to reject the things we do not understand. But when you embrace these things…when you look at difficult questions in new ways that make the mind uncomfortable, well, this is how you come to new solutions. This is how you make progress.”
Our discussion tonight is far more involved than anything I was prepared for. Aziz and his wife are inventors and designers, originally from Iran. Long ago, they immigrated to the United States. Years later, they immigrated again, this time to Canada.
They’re also my roommates. I found them online because they had a spare bedroom and real-estate here is some of the most expensive in the world. This bedroom could properly be called a storage closet if not for the floor-to-ceiling window and my million-dollar views of North Vancouver and the North Shore Mountains.
I’m here because I’ve resigned from my secure job in the place of my birth, packed my belongings into a shipping container, left my family and friends, and started a new job in a new city where I don’t know anyone.
I Wonder Whose Stuff This Is?
I’m a planner. I operate on spreadsheets, calendars, and gantt charts. I executed this move with precision. But there’s always something.
Aziz is simmering a pot of vegetable soup on the stove. He credits his unfailing health to his diet of vegetables, beans, pulses, and sprouted grains. He offers me some soup when I complain that I’m not feeling well.
Back home, a property manager has installed a new dishwasher for my tenant, but failed to detect a serious malfunction. Now the property is full of water. I’m trying to coordinate getting a replacement dishwasher with the manufacturer and retailer, but the process is aggravating. The manufacturer won’t deal with me because I’m not physically near the dishwasher. The retailer won’t deal with the property manager because I’m the one who paid for the dishwasher.
My shipping company called today to tell me they’ve misplaced my shipping container. They sent a container to Vancouver, but it’s not mine. I wonder whose stuff this is? My stuff is in a city, just not my city, and they’re not sure where to start looking, so they’re hoping I can help (I can’t). I don’t own much, but what I do have is important to me. It’s a weird feeling knowing you’ve packed your entire life into a shipping container and nobody knows where it is.
You Can’t Take Your Life With You
“What, you’re too good to eat with the rest of us?” Rachel jests as she walks up behind me.
I’m sitting in the lounge at work, headphones in, somewhat watching YouTube but mostly staring out the window (the views in Vancouver rarely disappoint). I hadn’t noticed the tables behind me filling up with my new colleagues.
“The problem is I’m kind of a snob,” I answer, chewing on my apple. I worry, for a moment, that I’ve really grown so misanthropic, and that I’m only half-joking.
Rachel is incredulous, though. “Come eat with us.”
Rachel recruited me, and she’s been incredibly kind to me. I realize this kindness is a function of her job, but it also takes a certain type of person to do her form of work. I’m a week into my new life, and she’s the closest thing I have to a friend for hundreds of miles.
When her and I spoke for the first time, she gave me a warning about going through with the recruitment process. “You can’t take your life with you,” she said. She would know. She, too, moved here from another place.
It’s not hard to meet people if you’re willing to approach them and talk to them. People often respond favorably to new social interactions if the environment is right. Real friendships, though, don’t happen that way. They develop more organically, rooted in shared experience over time. Friends are not made so much as they are gained. I’m fortunate to have many good friends back home. I’ve known most of them for ten years or more. They’re still my friends, of course. But they’re not here.
I feel as if I’ve gotten back into the friendship game the way a person might get back into the dating game after a divorce. I’ve forgotten how to make friends. I have to learn all over again. I’m an introvert, sure, but the crippling effects of loneliness are severe and well-documented. Even I would suffer them, in time. Misanthropic or not, we are a social species.
The Lingering Question
Vancouver is an interesting city. No matter how much money you make, it’s never enough. And yet, you don’t need a lot of money to enjoy the best things about the city. No matter how many people are around you, it’s possible to feel profoundly alone. And yet, even when no one is in sight, it’s possible to feel deeply connected to the city and its people.
Nothing is purely better or worse than anything else. Even the best of things have their shortcomings, the worst things their moments of redemption.
In nothing is my perception of this reality more acute than in my new home. There are moments I long for the home I left behind. There are moments of elation and bright hope for the future. There are moments of something in between.
No matter how I feel at one moment or another, there is a lingering question in the back of my mind, always.
It’s there when I walk along the beach and watch the palm trees sway in the breeze. It’s there when I look at the photo of my toddler cousin, whose affection for me is so complete that when I visit, she violates every norm of personal space to be as close to me as possible. It’s there when I play with one of the many dogs in my canine-friendly office or follow them on Instagram. It’s there when I ride Skytrain and take in the vistas of the Pacific Northwest. It’s there when I see news of the sub-zero temperatures and crippling snowstorms back home that always made life there more difficult.
Have I made the right choice?
You’re So Lucky
When I began to tell friends and family that I was moving away, I expected fairly standard congratulatory responses. Perhaps those responses would be tempered with sadness, and, occasionally, gladness, in the case of the individual we promoted to replace me at my previous job.
The reactions I received, however, were different than I expected.
Nearly everyone who learned of my plans expressed some degree of jealousy. “I wish I could move to Vancouver,” they would mumble. “You’re so lucky,” they would inform me.
My experience certainly didn’t feel like luck. I think back to the courses I took in the evenings, the resumes and cover letters I wrote, the interviews I prepped for, the flights I took, the possessions I sold, and the romances I didn’t pursue. I feel cheated that they see only luck. I sacrificed. I lost things.
“People are risk averse,” my friend Brandon notes, as I tell him this. “They’re comfortable in their lives. They want more, but they’re afraid.”
I suppose he’s not wrong. They say they wish they had what I had, but they mean something else. Maybe they’re struggling to take steps to improve their lives. Maybe they’re struggling to define what an improvement might look like. Maybe they know what it looks like, but they’re afraid of what that means.
The funny thing is, when I walk along the seawall, feel the drops of rain on my face, or sit with a belly full of my latest bowl of ramen, I do feel lucky.
Maybe Tomorrow
On New Year’s Eve, Aziz and his wife host a party. It’s my last night living with them. I’ve found an apartment of my own nearby.
At 11:00, I put on a coat and walk down to Coal Harbour with 100,000 other people. I could probably see the fireworks from the apartment, but I want a front-row seat. I wait in line to buy hot chocolate and cinnamon-sugar mini donuts from one of the food trucks. Then, I sit on the seawall and contemplate the ocean and the mountains while time inches toward midnight.
“How’s 2019?” I message Jason, one timezone to the east, while I wait. It’s the first time I’ve ever missed his annual New Years Eve party.
When I get back to the apartment, I’m greeted with enthusiastic shouts of “Happy New Year!” from the group. Everything is engulfed in the glow of dinner lights and candles. The warmth of the oven and all the visitors has made that normally chilly venue comfortably warm.
Aziz is sitting at the dining table with his friends, and eyes me as I walk past. “So, Ian, did you kiss any beautiful girls tonight?” he asks.
“Not tonight, Aziz. Maybe next year.”
He twists his face into a crude smile and picks up his cup of tea. He looks at me this way sometimes, like he knows something I don’t. “Maybe tomorrow,” he says.
