Hi there. It’s been a minute1.
While my Facebook feed has reminded me all summer that everyone I’ve ever known was cavorting around Europe, the fam has been prepping to go home.
After 25 years, we’re leaving Florida to return to Michigan.
Since Write of Passage closed its doors late last fall, I’ve been laying low2. My youngest daughter, Avery, was going through her final sports seasons, high school graduation, and all the pomp, circumstance, and drama surrounding the transition from high school to real life3. I’m happy to say I was parked in the front row for all of it—a silver lining in the loss of a job and company I never wanted to see go.
Work on the house also beckoned. Painting. Wrestling appliances both off and onto the property4. Turning screws, tearing carpets and taking rambling trips to the Hillsborough County dump. And I have to say, in the end, the place5 looks pretty good. It’s for sale.
Please buy it.6
Let’s just transition everything possible at once
Our days as a family in Florida are few, and nothing will be the same. Avery will be off to Michigan State. My wife, my oldest daughter, and I will be temporarily situated in my Michigan hometown while the moving dust settles and we get to the business of what’s next.
Each member of the family is walking around in a bit of a nostalgic fog, a state counterbalanced with optimism and curiosity about what’s to come. Excitement about new possibilities aside, I can see the weight we all carry: an era is ending for this family.
But then, what was ever “the same?” That’s a trick the mind plays on us. My wife and I were engaged on Madeira Beach in 2001. Suddenly we were newlyweds in our first house. Then our first child, and the second. Moving from one job to the next. The kids rocketed from Cimino Elementary to middle school to Riverview High. We moved from the first house to the second.
Nothing was ever “the same7.”
What’s next is something I’ve spent a lot of time pondering while grappling refrigerators and rugs. And while the particulars are still forming, I feel clearly I want to do something to contribute back to my home state.
As I watched people’s travel highlight reels this summer, I’ve felt moved to do the opposite: to put down deep roots.
Back in the place where it all started.
Mystical Michigan
As I age, I want more mysticism in my life. More magic. Let everyone else slide into pragmatism and cynicism—I’ll take the supernatural and serendipitous. Others can have at the politics and other pointless distractions89.
My recent reading has reflected that desire. CS Lewis’ Till We Have Faces, for one, and Neville Goddard’s Infinite Potential for another.
Goddard’s ideas have grabbed ahold of me. And yet I’m sure plenty of Christians find him reprehensible. His view of the Bible is that its stories are myths, not facts, designed to teach us how to use the power of God inherent in all of us to shape our lives.
But Goddard’s view of the Bible as myth isn’t important to utilizing his ideas on creating an ideal life. Regardless of whether you take the Bible as fact or fable, it’s clear Biblical stories are meant to teach us how to navigate this life with God. Goddard just offers a unique interpretation of those stories.
So I’ll be searching for the mythical, the magical, as I take on midlife in Michigan. I want to be enchanted by where I live, to appreciate it in ways I never did last time around. And to be excited about how I’m living that life and spending my days. You can bet I’ll write about that here.
It’s funny. As a 20-something, I couldn’t wait to leave Michigan’s wicked winters. As a 51-year-old, I’m optimistic about coming home.
As always, life laughs10 at our so-called convictions.
Thanks to Todd for reaching out to ask if I was still writing. That was the nudge I needed to get typing again.
And stacking moving boxes high.
Which, in many ways, is just more high school-like stuff.
Refrigerators are killer sparring partners.
The house looks great, not the dump. The dump looks like, you know, a dump.
I will throw in a 2013 Buick Enclave with just 185,000 miles, a spent A/C compressor, and suspect starter. Everything you need for an unforgettable Florida midday parking lot experience.
Except the humidity.
Ok, fine. I’m a sports junkie. Fairly pointless in the grand scheme. But Tarik Skubal has been supernatural this season, hasn’t he?
And great memes. I’m forever a sucker for great memes.
You know, life, you could laugh a little less mockingly. Just saying.
I was just five miles from Michigan Matt twice in the last two weeks as I flew from Newark to Portland, Oregon. We tracked over Erie, PA, Lake Erie, Canada, Lake Michigan and Michigan as I watched. It was truly beautiful.
Have you kept track of Taylor Foreman? He and his fiancé have moved to Louisiana. I’m in eastern Pennsylvania after a life lived mostly overseas. Living in major cities and / or their suburbs and trying to console yourself from that dispiriting reality with a summer vacation in Europe is not an obviously a winning life strategy.
Great transformations always start with events that have an element of compulsion. Jacob went on the journey where he was renamed Israel because of a deadly quarrel with his brother and the need to find a wife.
I agree with Rick that’s it’s not about the “or” it’s about the “and”. The Bible can be a mythic road map and a source of divine guidance. Seeing this new life phase in both mythic and providential terms may be the best source of motivation and resilience and measured risk taking that will be required by the challenges and opportunities presented by the return of you and your family to Michigan.
Please continue to keep us updated! Very best wishes
Hey Matt! Good to see this update. Got a good feeling about this move for you and your family. Best of luck on selling the house and the move.