Lifestyle choices

A rainy night on the train home, late because of an interview I conducted for a seriously-interesting research project at work. I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror of train windows in the dark. How do we end up where we are? You, gentle reader, how is it you came to be reading this blog on this day—wherever you live, whomever you love, whatever you do? How do we put one foot in front of the other and end up in the space where we are?

Life seems like such an odd series of coincidences and accidents and yet they all take us to whatever we do next. Three years ago, if you had told me I would be commuting on one winter August night from my job as a researcher to my house on the beach in New Zealand, I’d have assured you you were insane. And yet, here I am, on a little train chugging along the coast on a dark winter’s evening. Last night I woke at 3am, disoriented because it was already dawn—how could it be so light in the middle of the night? But no, it was the full moon reflecting off the sea, bright enough through the uncurtained part of my windows to shine into my eyes and disorient me. It strikes me that somehow I live on the beach in New Zealand. No wonder I am disoriented.

I have been thinking about “lifestyle choices.” When people here ask me why we moved, I can come up with no better reason, really, than “it was for the lifestyle.” Others back home speak, sometimes reproachingly, sometimes admiringly, about the fact that we have made a lifestyle choice to move here. When we talk to other immigrants here—from taxi drivers to coworkers to friends—it’s always the same. We come here to this tiny jewel of a country because we want our lives to be different than they were in England or Kenya or Australia or the US. We come because this is a fantastic place to raise children, because it is clean and safe and still filled with opportunity.

So this was, I admit, a radical lifestyle choice, to move my family across the world and away from everyone we’ve ever known, everyone who shares our DNA. But really every choice we all make is a lifestyle choice. And yet many of our choices don’t have that flavor—we just do them, putting one foot in front of the other. Isn’t getting up each day a kind of lifestyle choice? Buying a townhouse in the suburbs? Going to grad school? Keeping a job you hate because your mortgage is too high to change jobs? Living in the same place for 20 years? These are the choices that make our lives.

So what is it that we’re doing when we make those lifestyle choices? It seems to me that we make the big ones with our eyes open and with care—shall I move across the country/quit my job/have a baby/get a divorce? But the other ones, the small, daily choices that actually create our lives, we don’t focus on much. Do I take one more consulting gig this month because we want a new car? What shall we do after school this week? How should we spend our weekends? Should I call my dad with my only open time on a Saturday morning or shall I just sit in the blissful silence of it all? Our lives are lived in these moments, and these little moments create the big ones.

Not three years ago we got home from a lovely holiday in New Zealand, and we arrived very late to a chilly night and came home to a house without a dog (who was at the kennel). Michael and I struggled to get the kids to bed after 26 hours of travel and then lay down in our bed and tried to battle the jetlag to get our eyes to close. A short time after we finally drifted off, we were awakened by the throbbing sound of helicopters, low and circling above us. Searchlights glinted off our windows and disappeared. Sirens in the distance got louder and multiplied. And for 3 hours that night, the helicopters pounded, the lights flashed, the sirens screamed. Welcome home, they hollered. How’s your lifestyle now? We lay in bed in anxious and miserable half-sleep wondering if it was a dirty bomb exploding in front of the White House, an escaped convict, an enormous fire. (It was a crime spree, seven dead in two hours, with the hijacked car abandoned one block from our house. The guys were never caught.) I think it was in those moments that the idea of a major lifestyle change came to us, and that night was the clarion call when our spirits would flag. Still sometimes, listening to the pounding of the sea or seeing the daylight-reflection of the moon on water, Michael will tease that it’s the search copters looking for those criminals again.

So I have made a lifestyle choice to live in New Zealand. You are making lifestyle choices to live wherever you live. Each of us has a rationale for our choices, and each of us faces consequences that spread throughout our lives. Because there are no perfect choices, each of us lives out in a compromise that is more or less easy depending on the way the hour or day or week has gone. Each of us has filled some of our desires and each of us has pockets of longing that we have chosen to endure. Tonight, in front of my brand new fire, I am warm and content with my choices. I hope all of you gentle readers have the things that are most important to you, that the life you live is the one you have chosen.