To express yourself in freedom, you must die to everything of yesterday. From the ‘old’, you derive security; from the ‘new’, you gain the flow.

About two years ago when we decided to move here, we did what anyone does after making giant life decisions: we immediately asked Google for answers. To test our sanity, we searched for every story we could find from people who relocated to Alaska so we could hear what they experienced. And to be honest, at first I was a a little worried.

Tradeoffs do exist. Yeah, this place is gorgeous as hell, but apparently there are down sides. It can be dangerous here. We learned second-hand about people getting mauled by bears, lost in the wilderness, drowned in untamed rivers, and frozen to death. Those things are scary, but with some intelligence they can be avoided — we were more concerned about the common logistical problems we would no doubt encounter.

Online there are copious transplant accounts of insomnia, long winters, and depression in Alaska. We read a lot of articles by the newly arrived who could not bear the winter’s long nights and SAD from lack of sunlight, or the summer’s sunlight-induced insomnia. If you do the research, you will find that many decide to move back to wherever they came from in the lower forty-eight because it was too difficult to adapt. These are the kind of stories that made me mildly rethink the decision to come here, and made us even more sensitive to preparing.

Yet, now it’s clear most of what we read was bullshit. Yeah, there are inherent differences between the living method required in Alaska and most other places, but that can be said about any two locations on the planet. With a little experience, thriving here is easy.

I think it was probably the middle of July 2019, after we had slept with sun-blocking masks for about two weeks, that we understood how much of a mistake it was seeking the experience of other people who moved here from the lower forty-eight. And even if we saw positive accounts, reading them for anything other than entertainment would have been a mistake, too.

Endless summer days, longer than half-year winters with long nights, and isolation from family are all totally real here. Yet despite it all, we couldn’t be happier — but no conscious preparation helped. The key to our acclimation in this new environment began years ago, with our willingness to ignore unfounded fears about the unknowns. It started with a series of small, unrelated decisions to change and grow and learn, to diminish ego and experience life together regardless: we prosper in our own way today because years ago we decided to let go.

Maybe that’s why, after only eighteen months, this place feels familiar — but then so did Washington. I suspect anywhere would. We can’t be sure, but it seems like being part of life and connecting to the moment is easier with less of an identity anchoring us. And clearly our recent humility is a factor.