The town I live in was just listed as number seven on Money Magazine’s list of the Ten Best Places to Live in the U.S. The magazine offers all kinds of facts and figures which together form the basis for their decision. There are strictly financial factors listed, like median home price and household income levels, property tax rates and such like. Other typical “quality of life” measures are also listed: proximity to green space, a large city, institutions of higher education, and so on. They even have a whole section addressing the health of people in the community: average BMI (body mass index), and rates for things like diabetes and hypertension. The whole thing is the talk of the town this week, of course. Some are amazed, some feel it’s an overdue realization, most are at least a little proud.
I like this town very much, but the whole notion of living in one of the “10 Best Places” to live has me thinking about what, beyond reportable data, makes for a good place to live. I have lived in 23 different dwellings thus far in my life, in 11 different cities and towns, and spent most of my childhood and early adulthood moving. I loved most of the places I lived, for different reasons, and aside from a particularly traumatic move when I was 13, I rather enjoyed the changes.
When I was in seminary I was talking with an acquaintance who began to complain with some drama about how she hated Boston and couldn’t wait to leave. I hadn’t really given a lot of thought to whether I particularly liked the place or not: it was the place I was living, and that made it home, and it was fine with me. In my mind she hardly qualified as having “lived in Boston” since she was a grad student in Cambridge who rarely ventured further than neighboring Somerville, and had made it a point to prove herself too good for Boston for as long as I had known her. Nothing was spared: the people were rude, the buses were late, the weather was terrible, and there was no redeeming culture or nightlife. I was overcome by an almost overwhelming desire to slap her.
I surprised myself by feeling a loyalty to the place I was living, which I hadn’t realized had become my home. My acquaintance was asserting her own rejection of the place and in so doing was also stating clearly that she intended only to be a passer-through, while I had been busy establishing my life there. I didn’t think it would be permanent, but what did I know of permanent anyway? Wherever I was living was home, and I then realized was worth defending and protecting from someone who wanted to take a crap all over it just because they were unhappy with how things were turning out for them.
Not every place is for everybody, and some people are genuinely unhappy in, say, large cities or remote rural areas, or have to be near the mountains or the ocean. But there is so much more than statistical data that make for a “best place to live.” Things like meaningful work, and proximity to family, caring community, and true diversity. In our seventh-best town, there are people who are struggling to pay the $3 weekly trash barrel fee; people who are overcome with grief; people who are spiraling in addictions; people fighting terminal illnesses. Just like there are in the town whose jumble of statistics puts it at #7 from the bottom.
Since the news of our high rating, I keep getting a vision of the great spirit looking upon this human endeavor and chuckling kindly and wisely at our struggles to understand ourselves. Shaking her head a little and saying: “Silly bunnies, all of creation is paradise if you tend it carefully. If you stop taking yourselves and your imagination of control so seriously and learn to live in rhythm with the earth and with each other and with the beating of your own hearts, you’ll see. There’s no competition, my sweets. The suffering that is part of being human will find you wherever you are, and so will the joy. Find out who your neighbors are, and how your home got to be as it is in human terms. Live as if where you are matters, and soon you’ll find that it does.”
Beautiful. Thank you. Makes me miss Boston — and YOU. Just the other day I was wondering whether I am in the right place geographically, so this was very timely and good to read.
A wise and humble reflection, Pastor P. I’ll bet one of the magazine’s criteria was “inspiring houses of worship” or some such.
With thoughts like yours, it’s too bad you’re off for the summer. If you wait till fall to tell people not to let it go to their heads, it may be too late! Oh well, at least in the meantime the real estate agents in your flock will thank you for your forbearance. Or ought to, anyway.
Now why do I feel the urge to start humming old Temptations hits?
(“Your pastor was a rollin’ stone. Wherever she laid her hat was her home…”)
A wise person recently told me that there are two kinds of people in relationships: “let’s see if it works” people and “make it work” people. I think people who choose to love where they live are “make it work” people, and the “let’s see if it works” people often self-sabotage so that they can become “nothing works” people. Anyway, the latter sort always killed my buzz, particularly in college and grad school. I always chose to love where I was with great passion, and I would make the mistake of letting other people’s negativity question and color my experience. It took me a long time to realize that someone else’s experience did not have to reflect my own; that mine was still just as real.