A recent trip to California got me thinking; there is a problem with growing up in the Golden State. For the remainder of your life, no other place will compare. This is partly because no other place is like California, (at least in the US). Where else offers such grandiosity, diversity, a vast range of plants and animals, fresh produce, and glorious redwoods? 

Only in California can you enjoy breakfast at the coast, lunch in the desert, and dinner in the mountains. True, legendary traffic might throw a wrench in your between-meals driving time, but the possibility still exists. In California, possibility itself somehow feels endless. 

When I was sixteen my parents moved the three of us from our one-acre plot in a lush rural Northern California valley to an apartment in a twenty-two-story high-rise building in downtown Boston, Massachusetts. Brick was substituted for skylights, neatly trimmed hedges for fields of mustard and poppies.

My mom and dad had good intentions and valid reasons—my father had been offered an editor position at a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper, and my mother had grown up in the Boston area and welcomed the chance to live close to her aging mother and younger sister who remained there.

The rationale behind our move was understandable, but the cross-country shift hit me hard. Once there, I often had the sensation that I’d landed in a foreign country—the flat landscape, humidity, unfamiliar food and smells, obsession with sports, prickly attitudes, and sometimes undecipherable accents/slang all combined to made me feel like an outsider who might never crack the code required to live comfortably in my adopted state. 

Over time, things improved. I made friends, recognized the freedom the subway offered to non-drivers, got to know my mother’s family, found the bookstores, and took up rollerblading on the paths that lined the Charles River. Briny clam chowder and thin-crust pizza became diet staples.
Yet part of me never stopped missing the state that formed me. In fact, for a long while it felt as if I was pining for a lover, one that I’d been forced to leave behind and to whom subsequent lovers paled in comparison. When can I move back? I’d ask myself, sometimes daily. When can I settle back into the arms of my first love?

You might wonder how I broke the spell, cracked the code, and found happiness again. The answer is simple: I stopped comparing and started appreciating. The Charles River is not the Pacific Ocean, and it doesn’t have to be. The Boston Commons is not Golden Gate Park, nor should it be. I began to grasp that everything has its place and purpose and that I wasn’t fully living the good life I’d been given. Instead, I was keeping a foot in another world, one far away from the present. That way of living, halfway invested and forever dissatisfied, was making me miserable. 

Learning to appreciate right now and right here and ceasing to compare has served me well over the years. Nowadays, instead of living on one of the coasts I live in the beautiful middle of the US, and I call often on the conclusions I came to all those years ago. 

California will forever remain my first love, and rightfully so, but I’ve developed a muscle that helps me find beauty and purpose wherever I land.

If I hadn’t traded one coast for the other so many years ago I wouldn’t have that understanding—I gave myself the gift of a lifetime.