Goin' out to Canaan

We're moving to San Luis Obispo County in a few months, and one thing I've had to be careful of is elevating the place we're going to, to where it looks and feels like a perfect, promised land in my mind's eye.  As if we're going out to Canaan to the land of milk and honey.  Of course, there are some actual reasons to feel that way. The air is much cleaner, the climate more temperate, and unemployment is half of what it is where we live now.  The beach is close.  All those are great things.


But whenever you come upon a new way of life, the temptation is to view it as the perfect solution to whatever was bugging you about your life before, which pretty much guarantees you will be disappointed once you get into the actual reality of things. You know how it goes.  It's a year later, you're in your new place and you notice some graffiti. Or some 5150 fellow hits you up for spare change in the Kohl's parking lot. Or you see that the city's leaders are just as ineffective as they were back home. 


 I don't want to be disappointed. I want to enjoy the new area for all that's good, and be appraised of what's not-so-good.  But I'm a cock-eyed optimist, a romantic, and a dreamer, so tempering my excitement is not easy.  The trick is to see it as good, even better than where we are now, without falling into the trap of thinking it's perfect.  But on the other end of things, I never want to be such a complete realist that I end up giving myself a total buzz-kill about this life adventure of moving to a new area.  It should, in some ways, feel like we're coming out of Egypt and into a new and better land.  It should feel like starting anew.  


It's this way with everything.  Buy a new home, start a new job, or begin a new romantic relationship and you always have this honeymoon period where you think you've found the perfect "whatever."  As time goes on, you usually finds that you may have improved your lot some, but that your new situation also offers some new challenges and maybe even some things that you don't care for.  And that's where the work of building a new life begins.  Not in starry-eyed optimism, but in honest realism.


Yet, since we all know life is like that, maybe it's OK to dream, to idealize, and to swoon just a little at the start of a journey, don't you think?  Maybe it's OK for me to think of SLO County as The Promised Land, even if some residents there would disagree.  Perhaps it should be OK for all of us to get a little starry-eyed as we're chasing down Camelot -- if just for one brief, shining moment.