The art of productive elimination

Several years ago, my partner (Garth) and I took a vacation day specifically to drive to St Catherine's, Ontario, to help answer a question that would shape our next chapter: Could this be home?

We knew retirement was still years away, but we also knew we needed to start chipping away at the big decisions. As my coach helped me realize; , taking deliberate action—even when the timeline feels distant—is how you avoid being overwhelmed when crunch time arrives.

Perfect, on paper

On paper, St Catherine's made perfect sense. It boasts some of the best weather in Canada, with milder winters and warm summers that seemed like a welcome relief from harsher climates. 

We spent the day exploring, taking in the  views and getting a sense of the community. Downtown, we found a charming spot for lunch—a restaurant with sidewalk seating that captured exactly the kind of leisurely retirement lifestyle we were envisioning. The waiter was friendly, the food was good, and the little shops nearby suggested a walkable community with character.

Then a car jumped the curb and plowed through a row of similarly arranged patio chairs.

No one was hurt, thankfully, but what struck me wasn't the incident itself—random accidents happen everywhere. It was our waiter's reaction. He wasn't shocked. He wasn't particularly concerned. "Not the first time it’s happened ….," he said with a shrug, mentioning something about drug use  in the area.

But here's the thing: that incident wasn't what made St Catherine's wrong for us. The decision had already been forming throughout the day, in ways we couldn't quite articulate.   Our visit added up to a feeling that this place, despite its obvious attractions, wasn't our place.  Then we  went to wainfleet - The beaches were undeniably beautiful… nevertheless it  was not the one, either .  With all the right elements on paper…,  the overall vibe—as subjective and ephemeral as that sounds—wasn't right for us.

A flaw in the plan

With Ontario crossed off our list, we turned our attention east to the Maritimes. Here was a completely different value proposition: property values so low that we could pocket significant money from our current home sale.  The financial appeal was undeniable. We could afford to escape the winters entirely—head south regularly, maybe even for months at a time. It was an attractive option: buying low, living affordably, and having the resources to flee when the weather turned harsh.

But as we thought it through more carefully, we realized we were essentially planning to live somewhere that was only tolerable if we could afford to leave it regularly. What happens when health issues make travel difficult? What if financial circumstances change? 

More fundamentally, did we really want to spend our retirement years in a place we were constantly planning to escape?

These maritime insights  forced us to confront an important distinction: the difference between what we could afford to do initially and what would be sustainable over the long haul of retirement. Yes, we could pocket enough money to fund regular winter escapes—at first. But retirement can span decades, and circumstances change.

We realized we were looking for more than just financial optimization or nicer winters. We wanted a place that felt like home in all seasons, not just a place we could tolerate while planning our next getaway.

There's a tendency to view things that don't work out as failures—wasted time, wasted trips, wasted hopes. We tell ourselves we should have known better, done more research, been smarter about our choices. But this mindset misses something crucial about how good decisions actually get made.

Finding home, through what home isn’t

What happened in St Catherine's and our consideration of the Maritimes weren't wasted time  at all. They were successes—critical data points that moved us closer to finding the right place. Each "no" was actually a "yes" to better understanding what we needed.

Sometimes the most valuable part of house hunting—or in our case, life hunting—isn't finding the perfect place. It's learning what doesn't work and why. This process of elimination isn't a detour from success; it's a fundamental part of achieving it.

St Catherine's taught us that good weather and beautiful scenery weren't enough if something about the overall feel of a place didn't resonate with us. 

The Maritimes taught us that affordability wasn't enough if it came with the implicit requirement to regularly flee. More importantly, it taught us to think beyond the initial financial appeal to consider long-term sustainability and what would happen when circumstances inevitably change.

Each place that didn't work out eliminated entire categories of compromise we might have otherwise been willing to make. They clarified our priorities in ways that simply reading about different locations never could have..

The places that didn't work out weren't mistakes. They were investments in clarity. Every day we spent exploring somewhere that ultimately didn't fit was a day spent learning something we couldn't have learned any other way. These weren't failures—they were necessary steps in a process that ultimately led us to where we belong.

The investment and getting it right

Today, we're settled in British Columbia, having made the move work through careful planning and a clear sense of what we actually wanted from our retirement years. But we didn't arrive at that clarity despite our earlier explorations—we arrived at it because of them.

The places that almost were turned out to be just as important as the place that is. They helped us understand that finding home isn't just about checking boxes on a list of requirements. It's about finding a place where you want to stay, in all weather, through all seasons of life—not just the place where you can afford to land.

Life is like that.  The process of elimination isn't a detour from finding your place —it's part of the journey toward it…a . successful step toward clarity.