Be Willing to Start All Over Again

“It’s not the end of everything. It’s just the end of everything you know.”

“It’s not the end of everything. It’s just the end of everything you know.”
~ Bob Schneider, musician/lyricist

I’m driving halfway across the North American continent for the fifth time in three years – seeking yet again the elusive promise of Home.

Stopped for the night at a highway motel in the desert deep heart of Texas, I’m exhausted. I’ve spent this last week shoving a 4-bedroom home’s worth of furniture into storage, giving away what wouldn’t fit inside a 16’x8’ container (3 large mattresses, 2 desks, a patio set, side tables, artwork, and more).

My wife and I left Los Angeles in 2022 amidst the great pandemic migration that significantly redistributed humanity away from large metropolises like ours towards smaller, nature-adjacent cities, towns, and rural areas. In our case, we got on the cattle train headed for Texas. So many of our friends – well, my friends – were already setting up homestead there, boasting tales of quaint country living and wildly affordable housing (compared to LA).

For two years we gave Austin a spirited try. Silvy even made a couple new best friends, as did I. But in the end, Austin wasn’t for us. We’re just not Texans (I’d been warned by an old Texan oilman coaching client of mine when I told him I was moving to Texas so we’d both be Texans now. With both respect and resoluteness in his voice he responded, “No. You might be movin’ to Texas, but you ain’t gonna be Texan.” He proved correct.

It’s a long story full of twists and turns, heartbreak – so much heartbreak – and moments of joy and celebration, too. The details don’t much matter here.

I will simply offer that this final drive back to Los Angeles was the final act in the death of a dream.

I moved to Los Angeles from Miami, FL, at age 36 (‘bout 15 years ago). At the time, I was managing an exciting music band out of Miami and we’d been on tour all over North America. In LA we’d found the place we could believe our biggest dreams might actually come true. Of course, like countless other aspiring dreamers who come ashore here dripping with smiley optimism, our dreams of global success and stardom were eventually smashed to bits against the harsh rocks of reality.

But something else profound was happening for me in LA. Though I didn’t know it then, dormant parts of my own creative spirit were being activated here. Los Angeles was a vibrant milieu where people commonly did both deep inner growth work and also took big-vision action to affect positive change in the world through inspired businesses and artistic projects.

I quite loved it here, even after the band broke up and left me with an emptied bank account, wild memories to last a lifetime, and the drive to make my own mark on the world. I truly loved it here. Until I didn’t.

When my wife and I finally left LA in 2022, people often assumed it was because of politics, vaccine mandates, and government overreach. That’s not why we left. We left because I felt painfully lonely here. I was missing thunderstorms and seasons, easy drives down country roads, and quiet patio nights under the stars with friends who live close by.

We left because I dreamt of living on a tree-lined neighborhood street where my kids could safely walk themselves down to the local swimming pool, run around on summer nights collecting fireflies in jars (and set them free, of course), and ride their bikes along wooded trails that snake behind the homes. I wanted to open the front door at dinner time and holler off their names into the settling dusk to come home.

That was my childhood in the 80s and 90s – the better parts of it, anyway – and I wanted that for the child Silvy and I planned to have.

I didn’t want to raise a kid in Los Angeles, a city where I didn’t grow up and didn’t even know what to dream anymore. I never dreamt of fame and fortune. I don’t dream of a mansion in the hills. This city overwhelms me. Just driving to the gym can feel like going to battle. To see a friend I typically need to plan on at least 40 minutes in the car, and then be sure to go when traffic won’t double that.

Nature is my church. I grew up in the east coast Maryland woods. Yes, nature is here, as she is everywhere, but here she’s often a harsh desert mother staring down from the scrubby sun-scorched hills and browned mountains that ring the populated valleys – and occasionally explode into wildfires that spew toxic ash everywhere. She’s imported palm trees and million-dollar front lawns showing off exotic plants that don’t belong here (and induce massive monthly water bills to sustain them).

If you love the ocean, she does fill our entire horizon to the west. But given her frigid waters are regularly polluted (there’s even an app to track it), and her formidable waves and rip tides can knock you silly and pull you under quicker than you can say, “Is that a great white shark I see?,” I find her mostly best to look at from a distance.

Yet, here I am, driving back to Los Angeles.

Images from the road

To be clear, I’m doing this because I choose it.

I had a dream, and my wife was enrolled in that dream, if reluctantly so, when we both chose to leave in 2022. That dream didn’t pan out. Life threw curveballs we couldn’t possibly have seen coming, as Life does, and ultimately she needed to be back with her family, her people, in LA.

I confess that I put up a good kickin’ and screamin’ year of “Hell no! I won’t go!” I wrote to my congressman, lit candles at churches and prayed to all the saints that ever existed. I beseeched the Gods for mercy, and practiced whatever witchcraft I could think. In the end, I simply had to accept my wife wasn’t going to thrive in Austin.

Humans are like plants: we need to be potted in the right soil to thrive.

Silvy wasn’t made for Austin soil. It just isn’t her land. It isn’t mine, either, to be honest. It even proved bad soil for our dog, who developed aggressive skin allergies in Texas that she’s still battling.

Nonetheless, despite my resistance, I eventually had to accept that Silvy’s vision for our lives – especially after all the loss we’d been through – was just clearer, stronger, even dare I say better, than mine. Truth is, I didn’t have a clear vision for us anymore. I’d run out of dreams.

Though I give myself grace for that. After all, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to dream when you’re deeply grieving.

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**** UPDATE: I’m finishing writing this in LA.

It took me and my white VW Jetta almost 3 days across mostly vast, empty desert to get back here. I do love a long road trip. Especially when traffic is sparse and my only companions are my thoughts, great music, epic landscape, massive sky, and the occasional dust-devil twirling earth off in the distance like a whirling dervish throwing praise towards the heavens.

I get “no-demand time“ to reflect, to process my experience, what I’m feeling. It’s refreshing, cleansing, as every mile of highway sheds another layer of dead, outworn skin.

Something surprising happened as I began to encroach the outskirts of LA’s sprawl: I started to feel excitement.

I don’t know why Life brought us back here. Or how long we’ll stay.

I do know that I consciously chose to join my wife on this return journey, and that I’m committed in my bones to not being (or staying) miserable in life.

I do sense that we are coming out of a season of profound loss and grieving, and I know that Life can always renew itself in the spaciousness of an open heart.

My mentor, the author John Lee, once wrote, “The refusal to start over again is the ultimate form of passivity.”

Despite all we’ve been through these past few years, I suppose I’m finally ready and willing, at 51, to start all over again.