The Here, The Now, The Where, The How. Part I
There is an unanswered question that has plagued me most of my life. A question that has been asked by many people over the ages, especially artists, and that question is: “Does place matter?”
The gist of the question is this, if you have a choice in where you live, does your geographical location make a difference in your happiness, well being, personal growth, or general destiny, or, like a theater performance which has been brought on the road, will you simply recreate your same basic life in any geographical location, only with a different backdrop and a different cast of characters. The easy answer is yes, where you choose to live does make a difference in your destiny. It seems obvious that living in a different place, with a different landscape, climate, food, politics, attitudes, norms, mores, and local culture, will undoubtedly effect who you are, what opportunities present themselves, how you experience life, and how that experience shapes who you are, and ultimately, the decisions you make, that shape your destiny.
My personal experience and observation, however, does not necessarily support this easy answer. I have known many individuals who have gone off to live in far away cities, and sometimes far off lands only to return home to embark on very traditional lives that appear to be no different than the types of lives they would have chosen to live had they never left, and those who stay in adopted cities or foreign lands, often seem to recreate the same sort of life they would have had if they had stayed at home.
Certainly, going off to live in a different part of this vast country, or choosing to live abroad in a very different land and culture will augment a person’s knowledge and provide them with experience they otherwise would not have acquired, and that knowledge and experience will play a part in the choices that person makes as they live in that place or when and if they eventually return home.
Yet, in the modern world, it is striking how little difference there now is between cities and places that lie thousands of miles apart. Even people who live in modern cities abroad, seem to have lifestyles and experiences that are strikingly similar to the ones they left back home. Even those who go overseas to serve in the military, or to volunteer with the Peace Corps, and who have dramatic experiences that are nothing like anything they ever saw before at home, seem to come back, and have lives that are indistinguishable from those who never left. It is true those experiences abroad might have changed them, profoundly, but those changes are not usually apparent in the very traditional lives in which many seem to embark upon when they return.
To be sure, there are individuals who set off from their home towns, and who are, in fact, transformed by their geography, and the new experiences they have, and set a future path for themselves that one would never expect given where they started. Yet so many come home after being away, or who build lives for themselves in a new place that are exactly what you would have expected from them if they never left.
I wonder about those individuals who are the exceptions. Those who set off into the great unknown, freely traversing the planet, and either who do not return, or who returned profoundly changed. Those who make lives for themselves that are 180 degrees different from the families from whence they came and the experience they had before leaving. I don’t know many people like that.
(to be contunued…)