Everything’s back out in the open. I’m leaving Glide, my place of employ for a staggering three years, on or about May 15th. Emily and I will be moving some indeterminate number of miles east (between 2,800-5,400) this summer for Emily’s fall enrollment in a school to be named later.
So far, she’s only heard from Yale and she’s in (congratulations to those who cracked the code a few days ago). We will be getting their financial package in the (physical) mail sometime this week, along with e-word from Columbia. Then Princeton probably next week, with Harvard and Oxford a weekish thereafter. While possible stipends and such will impact the final decision, Yale is looking like the clubhouse leader at the moment. It was tied with Oxford as Em’s “first choice” and she can’t stop looking at New Haven apartments on Craigslist. But a lot can happen in a month, so don’t count on Connecticut just yet.
Meanwhile, something of a West Coast Farewell Tour is emerging already, with trips to LA over the March-April border, Seattle in late May, and a return to LA in late June (though we may have started moving by then, so it may be a post-farewell return). It’s going to be hard leaving the region of Earth whose land and people make me feel most comfortable (though Russia was close), but it’s clearly time to move on. It’ll be approaching seven consecutive years by the time we leave and that is really longer than I was cut out to live anywhere.
The next ten weeks are going to be emotional. I wasn’t really prepared for the outpouring of shock and grief that people have shown me at work upon my announcement. I told several people in person, sad that I couldn’t tell a couple more face-to-face because of conflicting schedules or untimely illness. I was prepared to surprise some folks, but the rate at which people thought I would be staying for 5+ more years blew my mind. I sent the All-Staff e-mail just after hours yesterday and have already gotten several responses, including a very moving visit and hug from someone I work with weekly at most. Besides a nice big helping of guilt (perhaps my resident emotion), I just feel overwhelmed by this reaction and can’t even imagine how much more I’m going to feel today when most people actually find out. It’s one thing to be able to intellectually articulate that a lot of key people might not see this coming ahead of time; quite another to witness the series of stunned faces and e-mails.
And yet, even most Gliders can recognize it’s exciting and for the best. Almost equal to the shock has been an incredible offering of support and energy for new adventures and opportunities in a new town. Emily now has hundreds of people pulling for her, between her work, mine, and all our friends and family. It’s good groundwork for the very foreseeable announcement of a move to Africa in 2011. Though if you can accurately predict one thing about the year 2011, you are well ahead of pretty much everybody.
And as that sentiment may indicate, this is only the beginning of the uncertainty. The move and transition will be highly time-consuming. We have to move the world’s least mobility-inclined cat across the country or even the Atlantic. We have to potentially prepare for switching countries. We have to find a new place to live, make decisions about how much stuff we really need, determine a whole new pattern for our lives that have really only been settled in one metro area. And the exciting boundlessness of possibility still lingers, more tantalizing than scary, beckoning toward a multifarious future whose options will narrow, but slowly.
People, this is an exciting time to be alive.
