The 3-Year Wall

Sunday mornings are very therapeutic.  One of us goes downstairs and sets out a breakfast for the boys, the other sets up PBS Kids video streaming.  And then we get an entire morning - 6:00am - 9:00am to talk.

This morning I was hand-waving about how I can't quite pin it down but there's some impending mental breakdown or disturbance in the force or something that I see coming.  Something's just starting to feel weird here.  Was it all the stress and bursts of frustration and fear that came with this crazy COVID-y year?  Is it this latent problem I have of feeling that I no longer am welcome in a culture that I grew up being told was the only place I'd ever belong?  Was it because Harmon's has been completely out of Clausen's Dill Pickles for four weeks in a row?  What was it?

And Paul, in his imminently Paul way (I don't know how to describe this), responded simply, "It's the 3-Year Wall."

"The what?"

"You know.  The 3-Year Wall.  We're coming up on the wall."

"The...what?"

And then he goes on to point out that our entire adult lives (and pretty much my entire LIFE life) we've never lived in a place longer than 3 years.  We've actually never lived at a single address for longer than 2.5 years before.  And in July, we're going to cross that 3-year line here in Utah.

And so everything feels weird because everything in us is saying that it's time to leave and try something completely new.  Time to start giving everything away and researching bike paths and "best restaurants" in wherever-we-go-next.  Time to start the emotional distancing to spare us too much pain when we have to say goodbye.  Time to go.  But instead, we're....not.  For the foreseeable future.

"Yeah, I feel it too.  Even at work." Paul went on.  "I keep thinking, 'Well, what now? What next?'  And I think it's even stronger because of tenure coming up.  I don't have a life template after that.  It was always, 'Just make it to tenure.' but I didn't think about what to do after that.  Not that it's all bad.  It means I can do anything I want really.  But it's strange.  So much time and freedom with no obvious structure."

"Yeah!  And!" I jumped in, "Like, my whole life template was basically to go to BYU, graduate/get married, and have kids.  But now, we're not having any more kids.  And so, what's the template for life...for...for I mean the majority of my life?  The rest of my life??"

We thought about all this in silence for a while.  

A very enthusiastic bird sang on our windowsill.

So! I said.  We'll make a plan.  AND here's what we need to do first: we need to figure out the distinct cultural regions of the United States...