I have lived in California for nine years.
This was longer than I expected, to tell you the truth, though I couldn’t tell you any exact number that I anticipated living here. I just had a strong predilection that it wouldn’t be permanent.
As it turns out, it wasn’t.
On September 27, nine years and 12 days after moving here from Florida, I’m moving right back, though just a few hours’ further east, making that same, interminable drive across the country on I-10.
A new chapter awaits.
It’s funny and wild and awesome and scary how different my life looks today than it did when I moved from Navarre to Southern California a decade ago, and it is wholly unrecognizable from when I moved from Maryland to Florida two years before that.
Nine years ago, I could — and did — fit everything I owned in a 2008 Chevy Aveo with room for a passenger. Without a functioning radio, I played the same Josh Turner CD, packed with 13 songs, over and over and over again. My options were that or the sound of the highway flying by with my windows rolled down, which was important, seeing as I didn’t have AC.
Upon arrival, I moved in with one of my best friends, Jason Wheatley, his wife, Jenny Kim, and her family (this will be crucial in lesson No. 2). Didn’t even have enough clothes to fill a dresser — everything fit in a carry-on-sized duffle and a few button downs and polos on hangars. Most of my trunk space was occupied by my golf clubs. The rest went to books and a few pictures I had framed.
Now I will again be driving, though this time it requires a UHaul, and even that didn’t fit everything we wanted to bring. This, despite our best efforts to not accumulate much stuff. I will be moving in not with old friends but my wife and son. We’re moving into a 3-bedroom, 3-bathroom home that we will be able to grow into. Nine years of full-time freelancing is being replaced by a hybrid model, full-time coaching with Florida State while stringing on the side as a commentator for Volleyball World while also continuing to build up SANDCAST, which, to my own surprise, has become a legitimate business.
Life, suffice it to say, has come fast. To say that it has worked out better than I could have imagined would be an understatement of preposterous proportions.
I didn’t know what I thought might happen when I moved to California back then, but becoming a full-time beach volleyball media creator while moonlighting as a professional athlete and coach was an impossibility to predict, for such a thing didn’t exist at the time.
There are many variables that have led to this ethereal season of my life, but I believe it can be boiled down to one simple sentence, a popular one espoused by Hunter S. Thompson: “Buy the ticket. Take the ride.”
Now I’m doing it again.
In the picture above, I have just arrived after an 18-hour drive from Maryland to Florida. This was at once the most difficult and the easiest of the three major moves of my life. On the one hand, I was leaving everyone — save for my good friend, Mark Lammey, who remains close enough to call family and who decided to move with me because why not? — and everything I knew. This is a hard thing, one my wife, who has never lived outside of Los Angeles County, is doing now. On the other, I had little, aside from friends and family — this is no small thing, I know — tethering Maryland. I had outgrown my job and would be challenged at a new one in Florida. I was about to live on the beach, one of my life’s ultimate milestone achievements, where there would be no snow. Career wise, there was little for me in Maryland and everything to gain in Florida.
It made sense. I just needed to pluck up the courage and do it.
I’m glad I did.
The move from Florida to California was different, in that it made little to no sense at all.
I had everything I could have wanted in Florida. I had a job I loved and people I loved working with more than the job itself, a rare combo I’ve been able to find again in California. I lived in a beautiful place with wonderful friends. I had a flourishing career and the freedom to continue nourishing it how I chose.
Yet I left.
For a state I’d never been to, to attempt something I’d never done before — freelancing — while, again, only knowing a single person, another childhood friend named Jason Wheatley.
On paper it was questionable at best.
It was also a gut instinct I couldn’t ignore.
Something pulled me West.
Couldn’t explain it then. Can’t explain it now.
I just bought the ticket — and lots of gas, although I unfortunately never did fix that AC — and took the ride.
Nine years later, I have been asked the same question I was asked in Florida: “Are you ready to leave this?”
There are so many reasons, both emotional and logical, for me to keep my family in California I could cry listing them. But I know a gut instinct when I feel one.
I know when it’s time to buy the ticket and take the ride.
