#166 Ten Years Later: The Top Ten List for 2025

For anyone who has contemplated making a major move later in life, the following are some observations from having made a major change of my own.

In 2015, I became a permanent resident of Lodi, NY. I left New York City after 25 years. In 2017, after 32 years teaching high school science, Diana moved here, too.

People often ask me, “If you knew then what you know now, would you do it over?”

The answer is, “yes,” but with that comes an explanation. So, to re-cap after ten years, below is a list of ten reasons this was the right thing to do.

10. Lodi, NY (pop. 1,469) vs. New York City, NY (pop. 8,478,000) In NYC, most people move anonymously through their day. Here, nearly everyone knows you, or about you, and you know way more people than you ever knew in NYC. I would take this over that. One of the reasons has to do with the “Dunbar Number,” which was the subject of Substack #69.

9. Be Nice, You Might Need Help Someday In a big city of eight million people, if you need a plumber or a roofer, there is always someone you can call. (New York City also has 40,000 police officers.) If you live in Lodi (where there are no police officers) you can’t assume that someone is always available to help with whatever problem you are having. So you become more self-sufficient. That’s a given. But since you can’t master everything, you are going to need help sometime. So, it is important to stay friends with everyone, because no one is required to assist you when you need it, especially if you have offended them, even by accident.
   

8. Failure is Not An Option: A few years ago, a guest my age (late 60’s at the time) asked me what I was going to do if the winery business failed. He meant, that for people our age, in the event of a failure, it would be too late to start over again. (He had a point.) Already, I realized I had underestimated how much it would cost to establish a business that would be large enough to support my employees (and their families). They are, after all, the ones that actually do the day-to-day physical work. Not only would it be expensive, it would take a long time to get to that point. “Failure is not likely,” I said to that guest, “as long as every year we make a little progress.” Every year we need to make some progress. That is not an option.

7. Be a Person. Don’t be Afraid to Try We often rely on a local Amish business owner who repairs engines and other farm equipment from his hardware store and garage adjacent his home. On occasion, we have brought him something in need of repair, and he has turned us away, “Go fix that yourself,” he says. “If it was made by a person, a person can fix it.”

6. Live and Let Live We own a farm of nearly 200 acres, which puts us somewhere near the upper end of the food chain in this community. We are aware of our good fortune. Which means we find ways to help a small rural community pull itself up by its bootstraps. We don’t share the same political views or enjoy all the same recreational activities, but we are trying to leave the area a better place than it was when we arrived. Everyone around us is fighting their own battles, so we try to do our part to be positive.

5. Don’t Forget to Feed the Crows In New York City, 90 percent of the wildlife around us were pigeons and squirrels. The other 10 percent were dogs on leashes. Now, we live much closer to the natural world. It can be beautiful, and it can be dangerous. The natural environment doesn’t really care about us. It is indifferent in that way. But that may not include the crows. (See Substack #64.) I have been feeding them peanuts nearly every day for the last three years. There are days when I forget to put out the peanuts. On those days, I will get in my truck to run an errand, and suddenly a crow will fly by past my windshield. “Oh, yeah,” I think, “I forgot to feed them.” I will turn back around and get some peanuts. Most of the time, the natural world does seem indifferent to us. Then there are the crows. Did that crow fly by me on purpose, to make me notice that he and his friends had not received their peanuts that day?

4. Don’t Assume Someone Else Will Solve the Problem For You There aren’t that many people around, and most of them are busy solving their own problems. But, when something very bad happens, people will show up. As they have in the aftermath of the fire that destroyed a village block in Ovid last January. (See Substack #120.) Several hundred thousands of dollars were donated to the victims affected by the fire. The community is now organized, not only to re-develop the one block, but to begin a multi-year effort to expand the re-development to include parts of the village that have been in decline decades. It takes a village, and for now, the village is stepping up.
   

3. Remember to Activate Your Beginner’s Mind Making a complete new start is a chance to acknowledge that there are a million different things that you don’t know very much about. And there is no shame in saying, “I don’t know.” Being ignorant and taking the time to correct that ignorance takes energy. But if you can narrow the range of options down, it doesn’t take really that much energy. It's possible.

2. You Can Live on Less In a rural economy like this one, we don’t have the extreme disparity in incomes that you find in cities and affluent suburbs. Instead of seeing parking lots full of Teslas and Mercedes, the local retail stores have old trucks and hitching posts for the Amish and their horse-drawn buggies. Conspicuous consumption is just not part of the formula in the Amish and Mennonite communities. In fact, their formula is the reverse of conspicuous consumption. I would not trade places to become a member of either community, but there are aspects of their customs that deserve our attention. In the morning, the youngest children walking to their one-room schoolhouse will wave to you as you drive by in your truck. It is important to wave back.
   
   1. It Helps to Have People Around You Who Tolerate Your Idiosyncrasies. So Train Yourself to Tolerate Theirs In New York most people ignore you. On the street they don’t look you in the eye, or say hello or wave. (There are just too many people to wave to or look in the eye. It would be exhausting.) In Lodi, there are only so many of us, and you see them often enough to recognize their flaws, as they recognize yours. It is even more true among our small team at Boundary Breaks. There are just a handful of us. Most of the Boundary Breakers have been part of the team long enough to have grown to accept each others’ flaws. And also to be grateful for our collective strengths. And for this experience, alone, I would do it all again.