Freestyle Living

This post is going to be somewhat informal and your writing may not even directly benefit from it. Still, something is telling me it belongs here; so here it goes.

I haven't posted in a couple of weeks, because I recently picked up some music gear. If you've been following this blog for awhile, you'll know I'm a musician in addition to being a writer. So I've been following that muse lately.

In addition, I've celebrated a wedding anniversary, spent some night holding my daughter while she has this really bad throat infection, been in a car accident that nearly totaled my car, and just taken a look at life. And that's what brings me to the heart of today's post.

This Halloween, my wife and I are trying to figure out where to take our daughter trick-or-treating. Last year, on this same date, we were homeless.

As our apartment lease expired in September, we made the decision that, if we were seriously going to move from the metro-Detroit area to somewhere in Michigan's upper peninsula or northern lower peninsula, we couldn't renew the lease. We could've paid month-to-month, but we would still be living in a comfortable environment, reducing our drive to move north.

So we moved all of our stuff into a storage unit, and moved into the Extended Stay in Madison Heights, Michigan. We hit job boards and classifieds hard every night. I drove our minivan back and forth to my job at a Fortune 500 company...with our essential belongings in the back.

We spent all of last October and most of November (essentially) homeless. I wasn't jobless, so that helped, but we rolled the dice and decided that we were going to make it work if we had to. We took our little girl trick-or-treating in our old Rochester Hills neighborhood, drove by our old digs - where someone else was living - and then drove back to the Extended Stay.

At the end of November, I was offered a position with an amazing internet marketing firm. I've never been so happy with a job, either. I can honestly say that I believe completely in the abilities of every single one of my co-workers. I've lived in 4 places since last year at this time, all of them beautiful places along the shores of Lake Michigan. Right now, the Lake Michigan shoreline is about 50 yards out my back door. And my daughter will grow up in a much more beautiful place than I did.

Was it easy? No. Not always.

But I'm soooo much happier now. And I've got new stories I can tell.

So, the moral? Take a chance. Do something that seems a little crazy. Throw caution to the wind. (Insert cliche here). If you win, everybody loves a happy ending. If you lose, people enjoy a story of perseverance even more.

Until next time, go switch up your routine. And listen to my latest masterpiece while your at it.