A year ago I was living in Grand Rapids, Michigan, packing up in preparation for moving to Milwaukee. I had been there for ten years, ever since I came north to help my parents, and I had formed many attachments. I knew I would miss several friends. I’d miss my church, the neighborhood where my family had lived for over 60 years, Calvin College (my alma mater, the gym, coffee shops, bike trails I liked to ride on and roads I jogged on. I had already been missing  mom, who died in June of 2022. The move to Milwaukee was to be near Jas, my oldest son, and his family. On January 7, I took the trip around the lake to move into Barnabas House, a Christian community for single adults less than two miles north of downtown Milwaukee.

Looking back, life was quite uncertain then, and I was unsure whether my plan was sound. Just about everything was changing for me. Living with five people whose average age is more than three decades younger than me could backfire. Would I be accepted? Would I feel at home? What sort of life would this be?

For the most part, things have worked out well. Let me summarize the last year. 

Living with five other people has been quite an adjustment, especially for an introvert like me. Fortunately, the others all work full-time jobs, so I’m alone much of the day. We do have regular times we get together: Friday evenings for pizza and a movie, Saturday evening dinner, and brunch Sunday noon. We invite others to Saturday dinner and Sunday brunch, so there’s often someone else here at those times. The house emphasizes hospitality, which reminds me of my parents, who opened their home to so many people through the years.

When I moved in, there was quite a bit of tension, though not much open conflict, between two house members. They were the two founding members of the house. One was older and the other still in his 20s. There was a longstanding pattern of the young guy breaking promises and acting irresponsibly and the older one withdrawing and harboring resentment. In August, the younger person moved out and a woman in her 30s moved in. that change has alleviated much of the tension. I’m closer to the older founder than the other four people, and we talk quite a bit. He has always been something of a loner, and that tendency has increased in response to disappointments over the past few years, which has meant that, though we’ve become friends, we’re not as close as we could have been.

So my closest relationships are still with people outside the house. It’s been good to live a half-hour drive from Jas, Jenn, and the two grandkids who are still at home. From January to May I picked up Theo, now sixteen years old, one afternoon a week after school to take him to an after-school activity, so we got to talk quite a bit then. I’ve been to several of twelve-year old Willa’s activities as well. I get together with the family a couple times a month, usually to eat dinner together. I see my other son Elliot about twice a month as well, often by driving the thirty miles out to Nashotah House, where he’s living in student housing and working on a Master’s degree Christian Ethics. Besides family, I talk a couple times a week with my best friend, who lives in Georgia. I talk from time to time with several Michigan friends as well, usually on Skype or Zoom. I have only one person in Milwaukee with whom I regularly go out to coffee. I would really like to have a couple more. It’s difficult to find people with similar interests who don’t already have full lives.

I’m learning my way around parts of Milwaukee pretty well, though there are plenty of areas I haven’t been to yet. I’ve gone to the art museum a couple times, seeing a special exhibition on the Ashcan School and another from a collection of 17^th century Northern European paintings. I’ve been to the symphony three times, hearing Beethoven’s 5^th, Bolero, Prelude to the Afternoon of a Fawn, and the Messiah. When my sister came to visit, we went to the St. Joan of Arc chapel (a village church relocated from France to the Marquette University campus) and the Pabst Mansion (the former home of the beer baron). My most significant involvement has been with church. I was heavily involved in my church in Grand Rapids and many of the people to whom I was closest were members there. I visited a number of churches when I first got here, then after a couple months settled on City Reformed Church, which my son and his family were once members of and which founded Barnabas House, where I live. The pastor has a doctorate and has studied at Princeton, so his sermons are intellectually rigorous and thought-provoking. I like that. I attend both an early morning men’s group and an evening community group. I’ve started to volunteer some. I’m not a member, largely because the church is affiliated with the Christian Reformed denomination and I’ve been unhappy with the direction the denomination has taken the last few years. So I’m part of the congregation but don’t feel quite at home there. It’s another area of life with which I’m not fully satisfied.

It seems like everything I mentioned to this point has included negatives: relationships at the house, lack of new friends, issues with church. Does that mean that I’m dissatisfied or unhappy? Not really. Perhaps when I was younger, those things would have been troublesome, but they haven’t had that effect. I knew coming here that life wouldn’t be the same. Life always has negatives; that would have been the case wherever I was. Understanding that is part of contentment. Arthur Brooks recently wrote an article titled “How to be Happy Growing Older.” It’s at https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/12/happiness-time-aging-mood/676964/. He suggests that you don’t even have to try to be happier for it to happen. Research has found that positive affect increases as we grow older, and negative affect decreases for men (but not for women). He reports on three interrelated characteristics that may be responsible for this outcome: “They react less to negative situations, they are better at ignoring irrelevant negative stimuli than they were when younger, and they remember more positive than negative information.” It seems that I have at least the first two of these. The negative doesn’t bother me, and I don’t pay much attention to it. So, though I recognize what’s negative, life as a whole seems pretty good.

This post is getting pretty long, so I’ll stop here and conclude my review of 2023 in a few days.