Moving

                                                                

As I reflect on events that changed my life there is a recurring event that I keep coming back to moving.  I have moved about 40 times in my life and I focus here on moves that had a big impact on how I see and experience the world.  Overall, moving meant parting with stuff that was not essential, leaving friends and familiar surroundings and routines.  Over time, I developed a minimalist attitude toward stuff and generally avoided deep emotional attachments.

These general attitudes and feelings caused by moving probably began subconsciously after I was born in 1945.   My Dad was moving the family each year from Burlington, Vermont to Lake Champlain for the summer months to save money by subletting our rented school year house for the summer to University of Vermont students.  Moving just became a normal part of my life.  

 In 1953 my Dad moved the family to Madison, Wisconsin to pursue his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin.  He sublet a house from Dr. William Hesseltine, a noted civil war history professor at the University and mentor to many famous historians like Stephen Ambrose.  I remember spending time in his study looking through scholarly books about the Civil War and thinking about American history and history in general.  This move

I remember well because it exposed me to a fascination with American history and was what motivated me to my college major and lifelong interest in history. 

A move a year later in 1954 turned my general interest in sports to a passion to play.  My Dad moved the family to Lafayette, Indiana where I entered the fourth grade.  I was behind my class, not knowing how to write, and had to teach myself and overcome the feeling of being an outsider and not measuring up.  I learned to blend in quickly by playing baseball, basketball, and football.  Sports provided instant friends through a team and acceptance by my peers as most kids my age and a lot of their parents and school officials admired athletes.  Through sports, I gained confidence in handling uncertainty, and new situations, and adapting thanks to the move.

A move back to Madison in 1960 jump-started my focus on academic performance and college.  My Dad moved us to Madison in 1960 to finish his Ph.D.  I enrolled as a sophomore at Madison West High School.  Most of the kids there were from families connected to the university and I soon learned they were very academically motivated.  I had spent my 9th-grade year in Lafayette focused mostly on sports and was maybe a C+ student at best.  During my first month at Madison West, I remember noticing all my classmates studying hard and being prepared for each class.  I realized I was behind academically and not working hard enough and I changed my focus and attitude toward academic work. I became more organized and efficient academically, adopting my peers’ attitudes, while still playing sports.  The move and resulting attitude change toward academic performance stuck with me when I returned to Lafayette the next year and changed my perspective and motivated me to pursue higher academic achievement.

My move from home to college in Bloomington, Indiana at 17 forced me to adapt alone without my family and I felt like I was in flow.  I knew how to make friends quickly and intentionally connect with others.  I stayed away from my dorm room most of the time studying, playing for the IU freshman baseball team, pledging a fraternity, and throwing myself into student activities.  The move to college opened my mind and nudged me to the world.

The move with the broadest impact on my life was in 1967 when I moved from college to the Army at Ft. Lee Virginia. My mindset changed to embrace the adventure.  I had a desire to travel, to see the Orient, and idealistically, to be part of the defining experience of my generation- the Vietnam War.  My move to Vietnam turned my idealism into reality.  Besides the fear and chaos of the war, I felt personally, I altered how I saw the world and more importantly humanity.  Coming out of college I was an idealist, dealing with thoughts, not emotions and experiences.  In Vietnam, while not in combat, I still saw, and in a few cases knew, civilians and soldiers wounded and killed.  I was assigned as officer in charge of military field depot operations of 8 warehouses.  I liked the feel and experience of what I did with the warehouses and this motivated me to study for an MBA when I left the Army.  

But the move to Asia was more than a spark to career interest.  Seeing and experiencing Asia and the Vietnam War firsthand was a shock immediately.   I had no exposure to Asian culture- food, clothing, religious practices, dining habits, and language.  My cultural exposure in America was limited predominantly to white Anglo-Saxon people. The culture shock helped me grow as a person and to develop empathy, understanding, and respect for Asian people and their culture.  Our Asian enemy was winning the war against the greatest military power in the world, using guerilla tactics that took away our technological superiority.  From that point on I felt a lot of my focus and interest move to Asia. 

My next move, from Vietnam to Ft. Lewis Washington in late 1968, was key in motivating me to go to law school.  As a newly arrived lieutenant, I was assigned extra duty as special court-martial defense counsel. The experience of defending the legal rights of soldiers sparked my interest in a legal career.  If not for the move to Ft. Lewis and the legal experience, I may have become a history professor.

My moves after law school were to St. Louis, Indianapolis, and Atlanta for a 30-year career in big corporate America where I learned not to fall in love with your company and always look for your next job.  The career moves helped me focus and rely on my capabilities, not those of the organization.

Following a divorce in Atlanta, I began moving in 2010 to find a home- from St. Louis to Tucson to Los Angeles until finally getting married and settling in Cypress, California.

What did my moves teach me?  I learned to internalize my surroundings and adjust or adapt myself to fit in.  I learned to read people superficially and figure out how to get along by looking for areas of agreement, common interests and avoiding confrontation and argument.  I avoided deep emotional attachments.

I am grateful I was born in America with the freedom to move.  I met a lot of people and had many different life experiences in the four corners of the continental United States and in Asia which greatly affected my education, career, and personal life choices.   Yet my life during a lot of this time was transitory which left me with shallow life relationships.  Finally, I found a home when on my last move I decided this was it- no more moves.   I wanted to go deep and have a deep emotional connection with family and enduring friends.  This is where the true meaning in my life now comes from-  being and staying deeply emotionally present over time, and, no more moves!