As I write this, I (we) am entering year three of a global pandemic. Definitely never thought I’d say that, nor did I think I’d be alone in an apartment in downtown Vancouver in my 30s watching snow evaporate from a normal-for-this-time-of-year rainfall.
Something I’ve been wanting to do for awhile – possibly my whole life – is to write more often without it feeling like a chore. It’s hard to write more often without structuring it, and it’s hard for it to not feel like a chore when it’s structured; hence my inability to write as frequently as the ideal version of me would like. The other way is for it to become habitual, a part of my lifestyle, without having to set time aside but having enough time to do it often. I’ve been there for periods of my life before, and I think it’s possible to get back there again.
I’ve lived in Mount Pleasant for close to a year, one of the hippest neighbourhoods in the city and the country if believe in travel article rankings. I’m sure living here not during a pandemic, or when I was in my 20s and going out more often than I could afford, would be a very different experience than it is now. I enjoy it – it has literally everything I could want or need in a neighbourhood, minus the particular intersection I live on being noisy – but I’m coming to terms with the realization that as I am continually changing, what once was a perfect fit for my personality, my identity, my lifestyle, isn’t necessarily perfect now. I don’t have the same needs or wants or the non-regular schedule to take advantage of nightlife, even post-pandemic. So I’m moving to West Point Grey.
Over the past two years, the most important activities to have in my day to day life haven’t been bars and quick food options – they’re nice places to walk and meditate. I’ve never lived outside the city core in my life, though I’ve fantasized for nearly a decade about living somewhere more remote, near the forest or the ocean, embracing a rural lifestyle with space all around me to explore.
Up until moving to Victoria in 2013, I wasn’t much of an outdoors person, but I had always lived in very urban areas without much green space around. I was floored by how everything looked there, and as I started to explore the island, I fell in love. Since then, I’ve wanted to soak in that feeling as deeply and as often as I can.
West Point Grey is far from remote. It’s just at the west side of the city, not even as far out as UBC, which has an entire neighbourhood to itself. But I’ll be living between Jericho Beach (above) and Pacific Spirit, and in walking distance of Spanish Banks, which are my favourite spots in the city to visit, with a hat-tip to Trout Lake in the other direction. So when I go for one of my 2-3 walks a day, instead of navigating Kingsway, the busy part of 12 Avenue, Broadway, or Main Street – four the busiest streets in the city, which I’m currently sandwiched between – I’ll have the choice, in one direction, to walk around a giant forest, or the other to a large park with beaches and feral rabbits.
I don’t know how I’ll react to this change. I figure it’s at least a step to see if I’d like living somewhere a bit quieter, even if it is still inside the third-largest city in the country. Better to experiment a bit before saving up to buying a shack in rural Vancouver Island, getting there and then wondering what to do next. It’s a pretty low risk attempt to see how changing my surroundings will interact with my lifestyle as I age and also just grapple with how I want to continue living, both within and (hopefully) after a pandemic, as my interests and comforts continue to evolve.
This isn’t a complete musing, but it’s something to get me back into the swing of things. Both about specific places that I’ve visited and will visit, and how I think about places and navigating through them. Everything is space, so everything I write describes it.
describing space 