Being pretty much an extravert all my life, I didn't realize it would take special effort to step out into my new community -- where I've now been living for two years or so. It feels different from the previous moves.
Perhaps I've ground down the edges of my extraversion over time. In fact I'm pretty sure if I re-took the Myers-Briggs Personal Preference Inventory I'd find I've taken a jog into introversion territory. And it's a fact that we're starting over again (in our eleventh neighborhood) more than 50 years older than when we moved into our first apartment in Long Beach.
Thinking about the energy it takes to get connected has gotten me looking back at what it's been like for us in other places. This is the tenth neighborhood we've lived in: Long Beach, Los Angeles, Alhambra, Garden Grove, south Sacramento, east Sacramento, Colorado Springs and back to Sacramento. Granite Falls and Bellingham WA. And now Escondido.
We're back home, in a way. My mother was born in this town, and Mike grew up about 40 miles north. We both have some family spread about "the Southland" and they have bridged the transition for us.
As we've gotten settled (and very settled in) we've been fed and entertained by assorted relatives, on both sides of the family. So they made it easy for us. A plethora of holiday invitations, for example. We managed to eat two Thanksgiving dinners last year, in the same afternoon. One was at 1 p.m. and the other at 3 p.m. and just ten miles apart. That's abundance!
But after a while you realize you need to establish a community life of your own. That takes stepping out a bit. It was easy when the kids were kids, and there was a school community. A couple of times the church (UU) engaged us. We belonged to a Buddhist sangha in Bellingham. But nothing has quite jelled here.
Maybe I'm asking too much. Maybe it's time to embrace that introvert. There's always the old guy to hang out with. We exchange dinners with a neighbor sometimes, and I visit with another. I have a writing group that I really like; Mike has a weekly art class. We still see family, but much less. There are old friends from older communities that we still see sometimes, or stay in touch with this way, on line, with blogs and emails. What more do I need?
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