Moving from Big City to Small Town

I grew up in one of the largest cities in Canada. There was always somewhere to go and somewhere to be; everyone was always in a rush to go, go, go. No one has time to stop and say hello as you pass them, and why would you? Why would you stop and say hello to a stranger? There was no need to. There is something different here. I moved from the hustle and bustle of a beautiful city close to the mountains to right in the mountains. Strangers have stopped to wish you a happy New Year when they had AirPods in their ears. The pace is different, everything is slow, and people have time to stop and say hello. However, if you want to get stuff done on the weekend good luck. A lot of places are closed. We were thinking to get our British Columbia Drivers licenses and we can’t do it without my husband taking time off work or starting early and rushing to get it done before end of day which happens to be at 4:30 pm. Yet again there’s no rush, people take their time talking to cashiers, not everyone avoids eye contact and are in and out of stores with a blink of an eye. Everyone talks to you like they’ve known you for years.

It’s not just that. It’s showing up to work because you want to, you want to be at the company that hired you. It’s not just a pay check coming in, it’s because you love where you work. I know I spoke highly of healthcare but boy am I glad to be out of there.

I step outside and breathe in the fresh mountain air every single day. I don’t smell the pollution even from the factory near by. I walk down the downtown streets and I see local shops selling trinkets or selling freshly baked cinnamon buns or I walk by and see people meeting up in a pub or coffee shop and I see a lot of happiness that I don’t see so much of in a big city. There’s a sense of safety sure you might run into someone asking for spare change here and there but everywhere you go you will run into that. Everyone knows one another in some capacity it’s a friend of a friend or a cousin of a friend. Everyone is somehow connected to one another and there’s this sense of community which I have never experienced in a big city. I worked for one of the largest companies and I would never run into the same people unless they were my coworkers.

Everyone is super friendly and helpful. I was unloading some boxes from my car and a mailman stopped and asked if I needed any help unloading I had to ask him “sorry what was that?” Not because I didn’t hear him but because I could not believe that someone had actually stopped by and asked if I needed any help unload more boxes. Never had that happened to me while living in a big city. A lot of young people might complain that there’s nothing to do in a small town but I found the opposite there’s always something happening somewhere you just need to look.

I have so much gratitude for this life now. I can’t imagine moving back and I’ve only been here for two weeks. Maybe you reader need to know that moving away from family and friends is not the worst thing to do for your life. So I challenge you to see the good parts of your life.