For many years I covered large geographic territories as a sales person or sales manager for Apple Computer. The reality was that it did not matter where I lived, travel was going to be inevitable.
When I finally got far enough up the management ladder to have some input as to where I wanted to live, I ended up staying in Roanoke instead of moving closer to my office in Northern Virginia. I will never regret the decision to not move since Roanoke was and still is a great place to raise a family.
Still that decision meant that for over ten years, part of my routine was leaving on Monday and coming back home on Thursday or Friday. The drive to Northern Virginia still is around three hours and forty-five minutes. I found it a good time to think.
Usually I could steal one week a month to be home. When I got farther up the corporate chain, I ended up having to spend a week or so a month in California just to keep the long knives from getting me.
Eventually the travel weighs heavily on you. I was able to do it longer than most because I eventually got a bedroom in my daughter's townhouse when she moved to Northern Virginia. Having my own bed, pillow, and closet made travel not seem so bad especially since I got some remote family time.
I enjoyed the Reston area and even still write a monthly blog about the area.
Over the years I have told a number of young employees that you can find a job that you love and live wherever that jobs takes you, or you can pick an area that you love and find a job that will let you stay there. Only rarely do you get to do what you love in a place that you also love.
Perhaps over those years I was prescribing medicine that I somewhat ignored myself. It is easy to rationalize history from a distance.
I did really want to live in Canada and figured out how to do it for seventeen years. Then Apple Computer became a big part of my life, and for a while I lived where Apple wanted me to live. When we moved to Roanoke, we took control of the where we live decision. That was in 1989.
It was sometime around 2003 that my passion for the Carolina coast came back to life. It was not until 2006 that we got a second home there and have been able to put down some coastal roots.
While trying to make money as a Realtor® in one of the worst housing markets in memory is not exactly easy, I absolutely love where we live on the coast. It is an area of rare beauty and filled with some very neat people. I also do not mind working hard to try to make it a good financial decision.
I think in deciding where you want to live, everyone needs to balance what makes them happy with what keeps them secure. That is a big challenge in today's world where jobs can disappear in an instant.
Most of us would love a little security in this world, but there are those who are sitting on piles of money and still they are unhappy. What good is it to be rich and secure and miserable where you live?
It is likely that if you define your life by money that you will never be happy with where you live. You might just never be happy period.
If there is a special place that makes your heart happy and keeps you passionate about life, I think it is worth taking a chance on making a life in that place.
I would never want to live a life where I avoided risk just to pile up more money. I doubt that I could live in any large city. There is too much country in me.
Life is a complex equation with no easy solutions even as your choices become more limited. Yet I suspect people living somewhere they are happy are far more likely to have friends and enjoy life than people who are living life just for the money where they do not want to be.
Money might buy freedom from some worries, but I still believe that it does not buy happiness. To work hard to get what might have seemed unachievable brings great satisfaction and perhaps leads to happiness as you get there.
In the end, try to live your dream. If you keep after it, you just might surprise yourself even in a tough economy.
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