The Checklist

I called my parents yesterday and caught them in the middle of their new life. My mom was in the garden, hands in the soil, and I could hear birds behind her voice and the soft scrape of a trowel against dirt. My dad was somewhere inside the house, moving between rooms, calling out updates about something he was fixing. They handed the phone back and forth a few times, mid-sentence, the way people do when they're both too busy to sit down.

And then, almost in passing, they started appreciating each other out loud, to me, about small things. I don't hear that often from them, not because it isn't there, but because forty-plus years of marriage tends to bury those small acknowledgments under the noise of daily life.

They've been in the new house for a week, and I haven't heard a single complaint.

It's not that there's nothing to complain about. A new house probably has a thousand small adjustments, the different light and sounds, drawers that don't open the way the old ones did, switches in unfamiliar places. There's plenty to grumble about if grumbling were the point, but the grumbling hasn't shown up, and I've been listening for it.

It took two years to get here.

For thirteen years, my parents lived in the same home, and about halfway through, they started renovating. The kitchen first, then the basement, then the bathrooms, then a new paint colour on the walls, then expanding garden. Each renovation was an act of care, and also, I think now, a quiet way of staying. The house got better in increments, and the question of whether it was still the right house never quite got asked.

I started asking it about two years ago, and my wife joined in, and eventually my sister and brother-in-law did too. Then came the criteria, the list of everything the new house would need to have, and the list kept getting longer. New items would appear after every viewing, sometimes contradicting the items from the week before, and they would visit houses that were, by any objective measure, better suited to their needs than the one they were in, but the moment to actually decide kept slipping away.

The list was never really a list. It was a way of staying still, a reason to keep looking without ever having to choose, because the comfort of the known is hard to leave, and the unknown asks for something the known never does.

Then they found a house, and they called us the same day to say they wanted to move forward. The funny thing was that this house didn't meet half of the criteria on their checklist, not even close. What spoke to them was something underneath the list entirely, a feel, a few specific things the current house didn't have. They had reasons to do it, instead of reasons not to, and within a week the offer was in and the deal was done, faster than they could have talked themselves out of it.

And then, almost as soon as the decision was made, the doubts arrived. Why are we doing this? Did our kids push us into this? Do we actually need to move? We didn't sell the old house, and we had long conversations about back-up plans, telling them that if they didn't like it they could always move back, or that we would renovate the old place to their liking and they could return in six months. We built elaborate safety nets out of words, because that's what people do when they're about to step somewhere new, and we need the parachute on the wall even if we never reach for it. Then they moved, and the parachute stayed on the wall.

What I've been watching, from the other end of the phone, is the difference between making a decision and committing to one, and how much of the work and the growth and the value lives in the second part rather than the first.

I've come to believe there's no such thing as a right or wrong decision, only the decision itself and what I do with it afterward, and if I hold back, the doubt grows and the pros and cons list expands and the reasons not to begin to outnumber the reasons to, until eventually I'm not making a decision at all but building a case against the one I already made.

The same thing seems to be true on the other side of the choice. If I'm complaining about something, it's usually a sign I haven't fully committed to it, and the complaint is the residue of the part of me still arguing for the alternative. Once the alternative is set down, the complaint loses its reason to exist. My parents, in the week since the move, have set the alternative down, and the energy that was spent on the checklist and the doubts and the back-up plans is now available for the life in front of them.

I called them again this morning, mostly just to hear it. My mom had moved on to another corner of the garden, and my dad was talking about a tree out back he wanted to do something with. They sounded like two people who had finally stopped looking over their shoulders at the house they used to live in.