Moving is healthy because it is change. When routine becomes habit, and habit becomes dreadful, moving is good, especially when it’s a total relocation. It forces you to readjust, make new friends, and have new experiences. Though difficult, and sometimes a bit of a pain, once the move itself is over you usually wind up happier than you were before.
When I was ten, my parents decided to move. Not down the block, or out of the city, but across the country. The prospect excited me greatly. When we arrived in Portland, I really thought that I would change the city. From that youthful perspective I had no idea just how the city would change me.
When I returned to New York for college, it was like coming back to my roots, and yet still there was the feeling of it not being home, for, after all, I had been absent for the past eight years. But my move out west, and my life there gave me a different view on things, and allowed me to appreciate the city in ways that I never could have had I stayed here all my life. Today I consider myself bi-coastal, because although I’ve lived more of my life now in New York, I still visit my parents and all of my high school friends in Oregon. And having two different lives, it seems to me, is more interesting than one.