The latest issue of Sunset Magazine arrived in my mail last week, and the cover story immediately caught my eye — “24 Best Places to Live and Work 2014.” “Looking for the perfect place to launch a career? Start a family? Just relax? We’ve found the ideal city, town, or neighborhood for you.”
For instance, if you’re “ready to put down roots,” the story’s handy flowchart offers you two choices — Issaquah, Washington (if “the burbs are calling”) or Sugar House, Salt Lake City, Utah, if they’re not.
Now Sunset is a fine magazine and they’re hardly alone in propagating these “best places” inventories. I understand the impulse to quantify a place’s attributes and size them up against other localities. But I worry that the proliferation of these lists have transformed place into a commodity rather than a commitment.
What I’ve learned from living in three countries and more than 20 locations is that there is no perfect place. Believing otherwise prevents the letting go of elsewhere necessary to create a home place where you are— a journey that takes effort and devotion.
Turning place into a consumer item diminishes its essential dimensions. As poet Gary Snyder once wrote, the demands of a life committed to a place, “Are so physically and intellectually intense, that it is a moral and spiritual choice as well.”
Communities are most alive when people are engaged and fully present — rather than merely coming home to sleep between commutes to elsewhere. Mine is the kind of place that people dream of escaping to when they’re stuck in rush hour traffic; yet too many of those who come here keep one foot planted somewhere else. Community is what happens when people have a stake in their place and an investment in its future.
My disdain for best place checklists is hypocritical, I admit. I was once one of those people who shopped for towns as if they were items in a catalogue. My husband and I made a checklist to select this place where we’ve finally set down our roots. I wanted beautiful mountain trails for running and world-class cross-country skiing. He wanted affordable land with room to plant an orchard and vineyard. We had a few other must-have items on our list (in Colorado, away from the interstate) and on paper, Cedaredge looked like an ideal choice.
As it turned out, the decision to move to this rural outpost has been the right one for us, but the things that make this place home are so much deeper than the items on a list. It’s the things I’ve lent a hand in creating that make me feel most tied to this place. Face time and daily rituals shared with your beloved are what seal your bond and give depth to your relationship. For a place, that means being present and taking part. It means deciding that you will be here and not there. And you can’t do that when you’re always on the lookout for the next best place.
My little town will never make one of those glossy magazines’ best places lists, and I’m grateful. The thing about those lists is that they attract the kind of people who expect a place to serve them, but this is backwards thinking. The best places are those with a devoted population.
It has taken me most of my life to learn how to inhabit a place, and I did not glean this lesson from any list. I’ve fallen irreparably in love with my little town by accepting it for what it is and forgiving it for what it isn’t. My community and its people aren’t perfect, but they’re perfect enough. If I want this place to become better, it’s up to me to make it so.
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This post first ran in January of 2014.
Vintage postcard from the Boston Public Library Collection, via Flickr.