California

You may recall from a few entries ago that, due to a number of circumstances which ended up with me back at Stanford for a few weeks, I have been thinking of moving back to California to start and help lead a new faith-community with a bunch of my friends and former schoolmates. Well, since life is short and action seemed to be required, I went ahead and made the decision to head back out west!

It was both a short and a long process, from different perspectives. From my perspective, however, I engaged in it (the decision-making process, that is) for exactly the right time–long enough to be sure of my motives and the commitment of myself and those others who would be involved in the community, but short enough to be sure that the idea, the dream, didn’t die of suffocation while I dawdled about second-guessing the feasibility of the proposition. I also feel that I was able to involve lots of different people in the process–all of my family (including a lot of extended family), friends from California and friends from elsewhere, and co-workers. The result of our conversations was consistently a feeling that, while there is no guarantee of longevity or success for a community like the one we want to start, there would be nothing worse than failing to at least try it–idealism tempered with a sort of jolly and familiar understanding of potential failure.

In sum, I had two options–to go, or not to go–and the first appeared to all my senses to be faith, while the second just had a vague smell of the safety provided by fear and reluctance. With that opposition in front of me, the choice became much clearer.

So, early in February, after my last trip out to Stanford, I met with my boss Pavi to discuss the conclusion I’d come to in my thinking. I don’t know if I mentioned this before, but Pavi had been a part of the process from beginning to end with me, and so was in a good position to comment on how I was going about it, and to help with his own wisdom (since he has been and is engaged with community projects like the one we’re envisioning). We discussed what it would look like with respect to Excelsis if I were to move out to California, and decided that it would be hard. This is where, with any other boss, the door would have been closed and I would have been forced to decide between California and Excelsis–the two things which are the most important to me (in terms of what I feel like I am supposed to be doing in life) at the moment. Pavi’s response, on the other hand, was: well, what can we do? I guess we’ll have to try it and work through the difficulties as best we can.

In other words, I was given the official freedom to retain my job and work long-distance from Palo Alto! For me, this was the last piece of this puzzle that needed to come together; I was set to go. So, last Monday (the 7th of February), I had a goodbye lunch of sorts with my team at work, and explained what I was doing and why. With their encouragement for the future, I packed up some key things from my office and took them home in the anticipation that they would give the office to someone else soon. It was a bit sad, and I hadn’t planned on it happening so quickly, but I had a flight to San Jose the next day.

So, crazy as it seems, I moved back to California on the 8th, with just the few pieces of luggage I could fit on the plane. Since I didn’t have an apartment or anything yet, I left most of my belongings in Florida, figuring I could fly back and drive with them in my car back to Stanford whenever it was appropriate. The timing so far has been pretty fortunate–my friend Erin is gone to Peru this month, so I am able to stay in her room, help her out with some rent, and have a home base while I get my feet under me here and start to look for my own place. Currently, the plan is to fly back to Orlando on the first of March, pack up my car, and do the 3,000-mile drive back, so that I am more permanently situated on the west coast.

This first week has flown by pretty fast, and I am adjusting to working at home (which is pretty nice–I can roll out of bed and be working on my powerbook in about 30 seconds, while some fresh tea is brewing and some Eggos are in the toaster or something). Sometime in the next few weeks, community stuff will hopefully similarly roll out of bed, ready to hit the ground running. The benefit of my previous trip to California was that a few of us here were able to have a retreat of sorts and strategize some concrete plans for where we need to go and what we need to do with our community in these first, crucial months. So I am looking forward to a crazy, awesome, and likely difficult time with getting all that going.

But mostly, I have had one consistent feeling: it is good to be home!