Why do we do this to ourselves? We tear ourselves away from home and comfort, safety and support, friendships and community. We take ourselves to strange places and, just when we start to feel the warmth of familiarity, our restless feet drag us away and bright eyes and tired faces find themselves starting again, all over again.
All for the sake of adventure – for an inexplicable, inescapable desire to discover and explore and see the world a little differently. To “seek other places, other lives, other souls,” as muses French-born Cuban writer, Anaïs Nin.
Every time I come home, my weary roots settle into familiar places and tendrils grow a little deeper. And every time I leave, I rip them apart – they have been torn and healed, torn and healed.
I’m scared of being alone in a vast, impersonal city. I’m scared of the energy and smiles it’ll take to recreate the connections that make me feel loved and vibrant. Do we ever build up enough calluses to expose ourselves raw to strangers without bracing?
The day I flew away from New Zealand and arrived in Paris, I found an essay in a book in a small artists’ bookstore that (as these kinds of writings tend to do) put it far better than I could.
“The thrill of waking up somewhere new, the weight of a pack on my back; every thrill, every turn, every tedious moment of anticipation is matched, almost perfectly, by the joy of home…This worn in, Sunday love for the place I know best – every nook, scuff and wrinkle of it – is matched by the desire to leave it.”
I can rest my heart, though, near the warmth of the thought that I have something that makes leaving so hard.
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