Here We Go Again…

You can return to a place. You can see the house, walk the streets, perhaps even find some of the people you knew there. But the home you remember existed at a particular time, among particular people, when you were a particular person.

You can’t quite return to that.

The house I grew up in was modest. My mother made it feel like home. She could make a meal from very little, and I don’t remember her ever seeming to be in a hurry. She was just there.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve never been especially attached to a house. I remember thinking once that wherever my wife laid her head, that was home.

Still, I’ve always felt compelled to keep moving.

I’ve changed careers, thrown myself into things I knew very little about, and found myself starting again in unfamiliar environments.

In my late forties, I moved to America.

Which, when you think about it, is a rather peculiar thing to do at an age when many people are settling comfortably into the lives they’ve established.

I arrived thinking, well, at least we speak the same language.

Turns out that was about the only thing we had in common.

I remember trying to work out what GOP stood for, and how you tell your elephants from your donkeys, and then discovering that the person with the most votes doesn’t necessarily become president, because the Electoral College gets the actual say.

I remember learning that going into debt was apparently the fastest way to be trusted with more of it.

I remember standing at the DMV for the better part of a day just to get a single piece of paper signed, watching everyone else in line looking remarkably at peace with it.

And I remember the first time someone asked what I did. I said a little of music, a little of media, only to realize they’d taken me literally and were now waiting to hear exactly what that meant. Or they’d decided I didn’t do very much at all.

None of these things was especially difficult on its own. It was the accumulation—the constant discovery that things I had never thought to question worked differently here.

We spoke the same language, but I had lost the shorthand.

I had to learn how to live in the world all over again.

And I did it voluntarily.

Something else has changed, though.

At fifty-eight, the pressure to achieve conventional success has largely fallen away.

The past few years have involved a fair bit of difficult, sometimes uncomfortable work. Looking at old patterns, confronting a few things, and reconsidering some of the ideas I’ve carried about myself and the world.

Some of that psychological clothing had been worn for so long I’d almost forgotten I was wearing it.

The compulsion to explore is still there. To create, learn, throw myself into something unfamiliar and see what happens.

But the need to prove myself isn’t riding shotgun anymore.

I don’t know if that will make the next unfamiliar thing easier. I suspect I’ll still get lost, misunderstand the local customs and spend the occasional day waiting for someone to sign a piece of paper.

But I’m curious to see what I make of it.

Here we go again…