40 Below in Inuvik 2

What's more important - where you live or what you do for a living? As soon as I decide which leg is more important to me, my right or my left, I'll be able to answer that question. Where you live and what you do are often inextricably intertwined. One defines the other. If you're offered your dream job on the other side of the world you will find a way to relocate to where its based to persue your passion. If you cannot bear to leave the place where you grew up and your family and friends and the house you built yourself, you will find employment in that locality and be thankful for a job that pays enough to allow you to stay where you want to be.

My husband asked me once if I'd follow him to the ends of the earth. How he failed to notice that I'd already done that is a real mind boggler. We've lived in Cambridge Bay, Inuvik, Pond Inlet and Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories where he worked as a Wildlife Officer, which proves that I was either in love or insane for those eleven years. Perhaps a little of both. But we went wherever his job took him while our kids were small. Then we had to make a choice in their best interests and we moved "south" where schools and facilities and activities and opportunities were so much better for them. And now that they're both all satisfactorily grown up and on their own, we can go back to making more selfish choices.

It's hard to measure and compare the importance of things when their values fluctuate. It's not a perfect world. Every day we make compromises and concessions and trade-offs in our search for harmony and balance. And if we're very very lucky, no matter where we live or what we're doing, we find it.