Anywhere but here
It was more than two decades ago, when this overwhelming feeling of “I´ve got to get out of here” started to set in. I had a good job, a house, loving family and friends, hobbies, volunteering, and still I was not at ease. There was a constant drumming somewhere inside telling me that there was something out there I needed to seek, see and feel. A sense that there was something I did not know, I did not understand, and I would lose it forever if I didn´t go. A bit dramatic, but it got so intense I thought something in me would die if I did not leave, change life and place… just for a bit, I thought.
Given the opportunity, will you jump?
I´m lucky, or there is some truth to what they say about opportunities materialising if you visualise them hard enough. At work they offered me the chance to move to the US for a two-year project and I took it and from that day, a few countries and many jobs later, I´m still on the road. It was not an easy decision; we are all good and courageous when we dream but some of us… “chicken out” when the moment comes. It is not for everybody and I wouldn’t blame anybody for not taking the chance, it might be “scary”. No matter how much you prepare for it, no matter how much easier it is to move abroad with a job waiting for you, it always feels like a jump in the dark… it always does, even after doing it many times.
The three steps towards traveller’s awareness
I talked about these three steps at length in THIS POST, but long story short, in my experience there are three main steps/phases someone must go through to have a truly real experience abroad: acceptance, adaptation and growth. Acceptance is hard and to give you an idea of what I mean, I will re-quote Henry Miller
“First you have to be crushed, to have your conflicting points of view annihilated. You have to be wiped out as a human being in order to be born again as an individual”
Henry V. Miller – Tropic of Capricorn
Sure, he was talking about something else but… if you get you get, it is about completely surrendering.
Adaptation is a bit easier if you really surrender to your new reality and, finally, growth is an unavoidable consequence.
You can only see land from the sea
“You can only see land from the sea” somebody said… or did I just make that up? Let me know… That’s the way I feel about my personal experience, especially at the beginning. If you are open enough, an experience abroad can open a whole new dimension where what you think you know, who you think you are and what you think you are made of, are constantly challenged and put up to the test. I was lucky enough to go through all of it and came out the other side as a different person from the one who left his country, a job and the circle of loving people around him. I needed to look from afar to the place I came from, to the person I was and to the life I had to fully understand it. I needed to look from afar to be able to see all of it, stripped of the emotions and the hustle of being in the middle of it to really see it for what it was, understand it the way it was and be at peace with what it was.
Returning home… or not
Almost twenty years on the road as I write this post, five countries and seven jobs later, I´m still on the road and perhaps I will not stop any time soon. Even if I settle in a country, that voice inside is still there, still telling me that there is more to seek, to see, to feel. It is still there but that voice changed over the years… as I did. That feeling that “I have to go” otherwise something in me will die has vanished. I´m free now, I´m not afraid anymore. If I decide to go somewhere, be it for a weekend or 5 years, well… there are no ghosts chasing me… I go because I want, because I can. I realised all of this four or five years ago… I realised I came back home. Yes, I have a physical place I call home, I had it before I left all those years ago, but it is not what I’m referring to… this ongoing journey brought me back to myself. These years, these million miles, people, loves, heartbreaks, successes, defeats, all contributed to show me who I´m, where I come from, what I’m made of and they taught me to make peace with it all. When I left, almost twenty years ago, there was a war to fight, something I had to prove to others, I was angry and afraid to fail.
Home was there all along
That’s the essence of it, I believe. Home is where… when you are at peace with yourself, the others, the world. Looking back, I´m now convinced that if I had not left when I had the chance, if I had chickened out, something would have died in me. I have my demons to fight, as we all do but if I had not left, they would have won, and I would have continued to run scared away from them, I would have never found peace. The journey forced me to face my demons and for a period, I won’t deny it, they also conditioned my life but at the end of it all I made peace with them too, I see them now, I know how they deal their cards and that’s awfully predictable now. Home is where you are at peace… where you know who you are. I have a physical place I call home and it is home because it is the kind of place I learned I like… we all have one. I like that it is in the middle of the mountains near a big lake, I like the silence up there, isolated enough that I can be by myself for days or be in the middle of a city in 30 minutes. I like that it was there before I left, and it is here now that I´m back… I like that it holds these memories and that somehow it was part of the journey… how, is another story for later.
