For the past few years, I’ve been talking about moving across the country.

Not tomorrow. Not next month. But eventually. And one of the biggest reasons has always been my parents. They’re getting older, and I’ve spent the last fifteen years living on the opposite side of the country from them. Moving closer felt like a chance to change that — more visits, more ordinary time together, the kind of time you don’t have to schedule around a flight.

A few weeks ago I went to visit them. Both of them are dealing with health issues now, and seeing that up close left me thinking about the move differently. I still want more time with them. I’m just no longer certain that moving will give me what I’d imagined it would. Which is a hard thing to admit out loud.

I could move across the country and have years with them nearby. I could also go through everything involved in uprooting my life and discover that life had its own timeline all along. I simply don’t know. And I’ve realized lately that’s not even the only thing making this harder.

When I first started thinking seriously about moving, leaving here seemed relatively straightforward. I’ve lived in this area for about fifteen years — much longer than I ever expected to, especially as a widowed single parent. For a lot of that time, I thought of it as someplace I happened to live rather than someplace I’d actually put down roots.

Apparently, roots don’t always ask for permission before they take hold.

Over the last eighteen months or so, I’ve developed a new group of friends who’ve become a real part of my life. And I have longtime friends here with years of shared history behind us. There are routines and relationships and familiar places, like weekly trivia, that accumulated without me really noticing what they were becoming. Somewhere along the way, the place I kept thinking I’d eventually leave got a lot harder to imagine leaving.

Which would make the decision easy if staying were the only thing that mattered. But it isn’t.

There’s another reason I’ve been thinking about this move that has very little to do with geography. I’m approaching sixty, and I’ve never really lived alone. I’ve lived away from my parents. I’ve built careers, raised children, lost two husbands, reinvented my life more than once. But with the exception of a few months after my first husband died, I’ve always shared my home with someone. And those months don’t really count in the way I’m thinking about it now — living alone because someone died is very different from choosing to live alone because you actually want to find out what that life feels like.

What would it be like to have a home that’s entirely mine? To make decisions about where I live and how I live without automatically factoring in someone else who shares that space? There’s something about that I’ve wanted to experience for a long time. And I want my kids — who are adults now — to keep building lives that are independent of me, not organized around me. If I’m being honest, I think I want to know what independence looks like for me too.

So here’s where I am. I want to be closer to my parents. I want my kids to keep building their own lives. I want to know what living independently actually feels like. I want to keep the friendships and relationships I’ve built here. I want the possibility that comes with starting somewhere new. And I’ve discovered that I also genuinely like parts of the life I already have.

Very helpful. Please tell me you relate to that confusion.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking that my uncertainty about this move meant I hadn’t figured out what I wanted yet. But I’m starting to wonder if that’s actually true. Maybe I know exactly what I want. Maybe I just want several things that can’t all exist in the same place at the same time. And there’s a real difference between those two problems.

We’re told that clarity should make decisions easier — figure out what matters to you and the right choice becomes obvious. Sometimes that’s true. But what happens when you figure out what matters and discover that several things do? What happens when staying means preserving something important and leaving means pursuing something important? Neither choice has to be wrong for the decision to still be genuinely hard.

I think that’s where I am. And maybe that’s actually the result of having built a life with more than one thing worth caring about — which, when I look at it that way, isn’t the worst problem to have.

I’d love to know how much time I have left with my parents. I’d love to be able to plug that information into this decision somehow. But life doesn’t work that way. So I have to make the decision with what I know now. And what I know now is that leaving would cost me something. Staying would cost me something too. And I don’t know yet which choice I’m going to make.

For once, I’m trying not to treat that uncertainty as a problem I need to solve immediately.

Maybe the question isn’t whether I should stay or go. Maybe the more useful question is whether I’m being honest about what each choice actually means to me. Because sometimes uncertainty doesn’t mean we don’t know what matters. Sometimes it just means more than one thing does.

Your turn

This week, join me: Think about a decision in your own life where more than one thing matters. Instead of asking which one should matter most, try sitting with a different question: What would I be choosing toward — and what would I be choosing away from — either way?

I know I’ll be thinking about this one for a while.