What Happens When You Finally Move

No, this isn’t about relocating or New Year’s resolutions — it’s about how simple inertia can sometimes blind us to possibility.

I don’t talk much about my family. I live a largely rootless life, which is partly by choice, but also partly by happenstance. I have brothers and sisters, and my parents still live, but only two relatives from a younger generation: My brother Fred’s children Kieran and Chloe.

As it happens, each one enjoys something I do, too: Chloe loves wild plants and birds, and Kieran is a rabid angler. I kinda sorta knew this, but it was a vague notion, nothing more. Then about a month ago, my brother and I were catching up, and I decided to finally take him up on his invitation to join them for the Christmas holiday at their house in Naples, Florida.

I booked a ticket quickly after our conversation, because I knew that if I didn’t, I’d likely hedge, and ultimately bow out. I needed to act on this right away. Big sigh when I hit “purchase ticket.” I hate traveling over holidays, and almost never do it. But it was a direct flight, so how bad could it be?

And just like that, I broke two of my strongest internal blocks: Traveling over holidays, and spending a holiday with family.

Life kept me busy until travel day, so I didn’t really think much about the trip. The flight was perfectly fine — although as a frequent traveler, seeing the hordes of clueless passengers wandering aimlessly and generally behaving poorly wasn’t my favorite…

I didn’t get stressy until I got to my brother’s neighborhood. I had to pull over to collect myself before I reached their house. What would I walk into? How would the kids be? How old even are they? I’m a terrible uncle. Deep breath.

Turns out there was very little deep breathing needed.

Chloe and I instantly hit it off. We are almost exactly the same flavor of quirky, only I have several decades of social training she doesn’t. Every time she’d open a conversation with some random fact or blurt out a question like, “what’s your favorite whale?” I smiled. Um, hi. That was me. Kinda still is…

Two things happened that may or may not have been engineered, but were certainly important. First, Kieran and Fred’s wife Courtney were off at a golf tournament — Kieran is apparently an excellent golfer in addition to being a fish hound — and Fred had work the next day. That let me and Chloe have a full day of neurospicy weirdness, just the two of us.

We decided to go to an Audubon park nearby to look at birds and plants and maybe alligators. We chattered the entire time about invertebrates and birds and strangler figs and bubblegum lichen and ooh — look, a small blue heron! Alas, no gators, but we did spot some beautyberry that we almost picked but didn’t because it was in the sanctuary’s parking lot. But I did let Chloe know that we foragers do our best work unseen by “civilians.” She nodded knowingly.

Hungry, we decided to eat Publix fried chicken, which is the best supermarket fried chicken in America. But first, I wanted to take her to a big, open-air Mexican farmer’s market in the nearby town of Immokalee. It was glorious, and so very Latin. World-class produce of all kinds, local honey, fresh tortillas, dried chiles — even smoke-dried Cobanero chiles, which I bought — fresh sugar cane, you name it.

Chloe had never been to a real farmer’s market before and was entranced. And since everyone there spoke Spanish, she got to see how pleasant and easy conversation in another language can be. “I need to lock down Spanish,” she said as we headed toward Publix. So I started teaching her a few words. Some of what I had been saying, plus, because I couldn’t resist, words like pendejo because hey, I need to be a bad influence at least a little…

I spotted a gigantic dead alligator on the side of the road. Let’s turn around! I want to see it! Chloe wanted to see it, too, but stayed in the car. It was huge and stinky and so very dead. A true Florida moment.

Pure Florida…

After eating fried chicken with fresh tortillas in the parking lot, Chloe wanted to go to an Asian market. Why not? Let’s do it. I threatened to buy her fresh jellyfish from a tub, she wanted me to try her “blue flavored” drink. And we got some weird Asian Oreos for her mom.

It was a perfect day, spent with a girl I share DNA with yet had never really gotten to know before, whose quirks happen to mesh almost perfectly with mine. I am still a little over the moon about it.

Once Kieran got home, it became clear that while he likes golf, and wants to be as good as he can be at it, he really likes fishing. He’d dip out of the house at any possible moment to fling lures into the canal behind the house, where bizarro fish like pleckos and peacock bass and sometimes snook lurked.

Chloe loves fish. Kieran loves fishing. So the day after Christmas, we hired a guide for half a day and zipped through the mangroves around Naples to try to catch some fish for tacos. We talked lures and techniques and boats and told fish stories. Everyone caught fish, even Chloe, who had only fished a few times before. But it was Kieran who caught the only keeper fish of the day, a nice speckled trout.

That night I made tostadas with the stale tortillas, some avocado salsa, lime-pickled onions, cilantro and served them with some salsa roja I’d made the day before. Fred was quietly skeptical of the kids eating them; they’re apparently finicky eaters. Turns out Kieran ate four tostadas, and Chloe two! That made both Fred and me very happy.

Sitting in the airport for my inevitably delayed flight the next afternoon, I sorted through what had just happened. Years had slipped past me not because I didn’t care, but because inertia is that powerful. It disguises itself as stability, or as duty, or simply as ‘just how things are.’

And keep in mind that inertia isn’t a villain. It’s often trying to protect us, to keep life predictable, contained. Survivable. Until it starts quietly taking things we’d meant to keep.

In the past, I kept telling myself there’d be a better time. A quieter season. A moment when I’d feel the universe waving me forward. It never did. I finally realized that no grand invitation was forthcoming. I had to write it myself.

And then, when I finally moved, nothing dramatic happened. No thunderbolt. Just… well, comfort. A breeze flowing through a room I didn’t realize had gone stale.

Turns out the hardest part wasn’t showing up. It was deciding to move at all.

If something — or someone — has been lingering at the edges of your life, maybe this is simply permission to take a gentle step toward it, whenever you’re ready. Inertia isn’t fate, and it’s okay if that move took years. Most of us need that long. I sure did.

What matters is movement. And movement doesn’t have to be dramatic. In fact, it probably shouldn’t be. It can be quiet. Tentative. A single small step is often enough to let a little air back into the room again.