Part of the moving process for me is taking a moment to consider the graces, big and small, that make each new place we live our home.
I naturally take inventory of the relationships that have rooted us here and given us a sense of purpose and place, the places that have become familiar landmarks and the means of locating ourselves, and the predictable rhythms of the neighborhood that have comforted us with their familiarity.
There’s the magnolia tree on Sontag whose progress I check with every walk I take, the known procession of daffodils then forsythia then the tulips all blooming in quick succession and the long wait for the peonies. There’s Jerry and Jamice walking their dogs mid-morning every morning no matter the weather—Jamice’s warmth as she exclaims over Lemon and Jerry’s short, sensible greeting. There’s the knock on the door at 3:30 every afternoon when Andrew’s best friend Jonathan asks him to play. And there’s even the predictable conflicts that arise between our kids and their neighborhood friends.
This time around, I’ve realized that this mental inventory is my way of calculating the coming grief, as if by anticipating the degree to which I’ll feel the loss of these things, I can somehow soften the blow.
Before moving here, we had put down the deepest roots we’ve ever put down. We became part of the neighborhood and the neighborhood became part of our family. This, I thought, is what it means to live in community. With each new place we’ve learned a little bit more about how to live in community and now we’d finally figured it out, as if living in community is a curriculum to be mastered.
I really thought I would take “all I had learned” at West Point and simply apply it to life here, to put our roots down a little deeper than before, to “do community” even better. I thought, to some degree, that every relationship I’d opened myself up to, every place I’d allowed myself to love was training ground for mastering the principles of community and developing a set of skills that I could transfer to this new place.
What I didn’t calculate for was the particularity of those relationships, those places, and how no amount of integrating ourselves into a new place could replace them. They were unique to West Point, and I couldn’t bring them with. In other words, I didn’t anticipate the grief. The absence of these friendships hurt. The loss of the comforting familiarity of our small neighborhood was painfully disorienting.
When we moved here, I had every intention of meeting our neighbors, diving into relationship with them, getting involved at church and our kids’ school. I wanted to “live locally,” as I’d come to think of it, to be invested in the people in closest proximity to us. But I found it painful to open myself up to future grief while still grieving. So I didn’t.
Instead I put down some very tentative, shallow roots. I would find myself venturing out, I’d see the potential for friendship, and then I’d retreat. In some ways the pandemic was a relief—a ready excuse to distance myself from others. I thought that by not becoming attached to anyone, I could avoid the pain of leaving.
Turns out, an attempt to avoid pain is just trading one kind of pain for another. I realized a couple of weeks ago, as I was making my mental inventory, that leaving still hurts, in part because there are still people and places that will be difficult to say goodbye to, but also because I regret not giving more of myself to those people and places.
Refusing to connect, to form relationships that tether you to others, for fear that goodbye will feel like a painful severing of nerves, is like a folding in on oneself. It is a choice that makes you smaller, a kind of self-preservation that siphons away joy, generosity, opportunities to grow, to know and be known. It’s not neutral—it’s diminishing.
Or at least this has been my experience.
I recently heard Krista Tippett interview writer Parker J. Palmer about depression. In the interview he says that we often think of a broken heart as being “shattered beyond repair, a heart that’s died.” This sounds like something we would naturally want to avoid. “But,” he says, “we could also think of it as a heart broken open to greater capacity to hold the whole range of human experience.”
And that is the kind of heartbreak that came from my goodbyes at West Point—it was the growing pains of a heart making room for others, making room for the sorrow and the joy that comes with loving others.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned, and this I do hope to take with me, it’s that I “cannot shield myself from disappointment by not embracing joy,” as Tish Harrison says in her book Prayer in the Night. I cannot shield myself from grief by not loving others.
“Love always involves risk,” Harrison says, “and loving again means risking again.”
But it’s a risk worth taking, because although loving others comes with the potential for pain, it also comes with the potential for joy. And to forfeit one is to forfeit the other.
Harrison also says,“To risk joy requires hope. […] To hope is to ‘borrow grace.’ It is not naive optimism. Hope admits the truth of our vulnerability. […] But it assumes that redemption, beauty, and goodness will be there for us, whatever lies ahead.”
I hope that if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that really putting down roots is a risk worth taking.
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