If you stop and think about it, life is just a choose your own adventure book. The only difference is you cannot look ahead to each choice and then take the better option. Everyone that ever picked up a choose your own adventure book did this. You cannot lie about it, you know you did that. I'm not talking about making choices like steak or chicken for dinner, I'm talking big choices. Choices that can change your life. Sometimes these choices aren't yours. For example, I have thought about how different my life would have been if my parents decided to stay in the Detroit area instead of my dad taking a job in the U.P. This decision was not mine to make as I was seven at the time, but if they didn't make that choice, I would not have met my wife. That's just bananas to think about, isn't it? That's also super scary to think about. How different are all of our lives based on decisions that aren't yours to make? When I sit down and think about those kinds of situations, my mind always comes back to two different choices that were made that impacted our (mine and my wife's) lives.
The first choice wasn't even really ours to make. After college my wife got a job with Cessna Aircraft in Wichita, Kansas. When we were graduating college we agreed that we would move to the first place where one of us found a job and that is just how we ended up down there. But this isn't the choice I'm talking about. Moving to Wichita seemed like a pretty easy decision. It was either move and be gainfully employed or stay unemployed and continue to look for a job. So we moved and worked down there. Found a great group of friends. Adjusted to life with no winters, no trees, and being far from family. We even started to look at buying a house. It was shortly after we started looking at houses that the economic recession hit and my wife got laid off because of it. This was about four or five years of living in Kansas, so we were fairly well established in the area. It's safe to say we dodged a giant bullet in not buying a house. We would have been in a great financial mess. Shortly after getting laid off, my wife started looking for jobs. We thought staying in Wichita was an option, but there wasn't much happening in her field of work. So she looked into Kansas City. Bigger area, we figured there's a better chance there. No luck. We got to the point where it was 'find a job anywhere and we can move'. With my working retail, and at the time with Target, it gave us some flexibility to move. Transferring wouldn't have been a problem. Here's where the choice comes into play. My wife had a couple of interviews with a company in Charlotte, North Carolina. One was a phone interview and the second was an in person interview. They flew her in, she stayed for a couple of days. We both thought it went well. The company even had someone drive her around the area to see some neighborhoods. After that, I started looking at stores to transfer to, even talked with my human resources manager about the move. Then the company chose to go with another candidate. Heartbreak.
We were on the verge of discovering another city and another state. We were in our late twenties, the time to strike out on your own and make those kinds of moves. To discover new and exciting places, even if it's farther away than maybe you had ever imagined living from your family. You never know what would have or could have happened had we ended up there, and that is kind of the fun part of thinking about situations like this. Would I still work for Target? (short answer is hell no). Would it have been a place we would have hated? Maybe. Or could it have been a city we would have fallen in love with? The answers are always going to be up in the air. Looking back on it, I'm glad the company made the choice to go with that
other candidate because it has led us to the second major choice in our
lives which has worked out great for both of us.
After about a year of no luck on the job front in Kansas or elsewhere, it was decided it was time to get out of the state. Outside of a great group of friends (our Kansas family) we had no ties to the state. It was tough seeing our actual family two, maybe three, times a year. We wanted to be closer. We wanted winters again. We wanted to see trees and water and not melt when you step outside in early July. We were able to pick and choose where we wanted to go. There were a few qualifiers we were looking at. It had to be closer to home. It needed to be big enough of an area for job opportunities for both of us. The economy in Michigan really hadn't turned around quite yet, so that was out of the question. We thought about Chicago for a split second then realized....ewww, Chicago. The idea of living in Milwaukee or Madison was also on the table. There are a few companies that my wife could have worked at. There were some factors that went into our decision to not move there. Another place was the Twin Cities in Minnesota. We have family and friends that live in Minnesota and they never really had anything terrible to say about it. After looking and talking about all these options, we landed on Minnesota. It was as close to being in Michigan without living there. The economy was rebounding nicely so the job markets were starting to pick back up. This was the second big choice in life.
I look at our move to Minnesota as that second major choice for a few reasons. The big reason is work. My wife found a job that was decent after we moved here and just recently found one that is a little bit closer to home and a much better working environment. I was able to transfer stores while working with Target and that made the move easier. We see our family more than a few times a year as we are now just a nine to ten hour car ride away. As opposed to a flight or a two day drive while we lived in Kansas. The past few years, I have been able to take some time off in the fall and go hunting back home. It is great because I love being in the woods at that time of year. Plus, I'm able to provide plenty of food for everyone in the years that I am lucky enough to harvest a deer. Above all that, I have found a job that I love. By the time my eighth year of working for Target was coming around, I realized that I wasn't going anywhere with the company. It was not fun to work there anymore. That was almost six years ago which is crazy to think about. My move to World Market probably would not have happened if we hadn't moved to Minnesota. World Market has been great for many reasons, but the biggest one is the relaxed atmosphere. It is not nearly as stressful and therefore better for me.
It was probably inevitable that I moved on from Target, but if we had lived in another state maybe I would be working for a different company. Maybe I would have found some random office job if we moved to North Carolina or a warehouse job in Wisconsin, we will never know. Making big decisions like this can be scary, but that is what life is all about. Taking big risks like moving to a new state or leaving a job can impact your life in so many positive ways, but those risks have to be calculated. Impulsively moving without having a plan isn't the way to go. I like to think that in all the other multiverses out there, we made the
move to Charlotte and to Madison and to Milwaukee and that those
versions of us are just as happy as we are here in Minnesota.
