You Never Know

I remember the first time I heard about Beaver Creek. 

I laughed when it was described. Laughed at the thought that some poor sucker would have to move there. Laughed with a rich sense of superiority at the thought of the tiny remote community.

Back then, my world was small, but I thought it was large. I staunchly proclaimed Vancouver to be the best city on earth despite never having lived any place else. I considered myself sophisticated because I carried a Louis Vuitton. I’d never worked or lived or gone to school outside of the Vancouver area. Nevertheless, I thought my life was perfectly figured out. 

Then, in the fall of 2018, C and I learned we were those poor suckers who would be moving to Beaver Creek for his work! A few weeks and months of shock and reassessment followed: our so-called perfect world had been shaken.

We thought we would live in Beaver Creek for a year. It was never supposed to be a long-term thing. In a year, we thought, we’d be back in the Vancouver area. We’d be homeowners, we’d have a child, and our lives would be urban again. But life rarely goes as planned, and in many ways, that’s the wonderful thing about it.

It hadn’t occurred to us that we’d like Beaver Creek enough to stay. We adjusted to the idea of the move and thought we’d like the experience it would bring, and we assumed that as soon as we got the green light from C’s work, we’d get the heck outta there. Turns out, we don’t just like it, we love it. Turns out, almost five years later, we have no immediate plans to leave. 

Does this mean that our lives in Vancouver were incomplete? Maybe not. Maybe it’s more that a complete life means the life you know. There is a real sense of safety in staying within the parameters to which you’re accustomed. It can feel so safe, in fact, that it can prevent you from recognizing how very interesting the world outside of those parameters can be. That safety can prevent a person from recognizing and appreciating just how different people’s lives can be from one’s own despite the fact that we are all sharing in the universal experience of human existence. 

At first, Beaver Creek felt strange to me. It was a place where everyone knew what everyone was doing, where waving was compulsory, where the population was small but the base of divergent knowledge large. I had a lot to learn.

Over the past four-and-a-half years, Beaver Creek has taught me that there is more to life than what I experienced in my little bubble in Vancouver. It has shown me that success is far more than a high-paying job or an accumulation of degrees. Life in the remote community has taught me to appreciate what I have. To look around. To recognize what’s important to me. It has pushed C and me to think beyond absolutes and to understand that the world is wider than we’d let ourselves think. We’ve been able to shed some of the societal expectations placed on us or assumed by us. We’ve felt more comfortable making decisions that don’t necessarily fit into mainstream thinking – an elopement, a life without children, an unconventional career path, a life without hustle and bustle. 

Readers of this blog will know that I am averse to change. If C and I hadn’t been forced to move, would I still be frequenting the same shops, working the same job, be surrounded by the same friends? Maybe. But maybe something else would have forced me to realign my thinking. Life is like that. And what I’m learning (slowly, slowly!) is that it’s best to be open to changes. A change of place, in the case of our move from Vancouver to Beaver Creek, meant a change of perspective and that, in turn, meant a change in person. My life is more fulfilled, I am more tolerant, and I am calmer. Is it the case that these changes would not have happened had we not moved here? I don’t know and I can’t possibly guess, but I can be grateful for where I am. This is the lesson I have learned from what doing what I thought only poor suckers would do.