I was reading Helen Russell’s The Year of Living Danishly (an excellent audiobook by the way - read beautifully and humourously by the author herself) and it jogged within me a very familiar envy - that of beholding those who have ‘moved country’ and started new lives somewhere.
It made me look at where I live, and very much love (the UK) - and what it is about travelling that makes those that don’t travel slightly envious of the nomads of our World.
Sure, we have all the classic reasons for doing so - ‘experience new cultures’. New foods, new climates, new humidity levels, new geographies, new dangers, new landscapes, new smells, new animals, new strange policies and legal contexts, advanced regimes, backward regimes - and whathaveyou.
But it occurred to me - short of an actual trekking holiday and literally not settling anywhere - to stay in another country still boils down to the same basic thing - identify and occupy an abode of some kind, establish infrastructure-based protocols (e.g. do folk walk to the shops, or does everyone need a car, is the country cycle-friendly, etc) - and then - exist, experience.
Where the experience of living can be distilled down to this - then I wondered where exactly does the ‘magic’ of existing lie, if not in travelling?
Then I watched a film or two which got me thinking - there are versions of our future where we travel to various planets and cosmic systems, the way we nonchalantly traverse our inner atmosphere today. In such a time and place - indeed a current time and place if you subscribe to Multiverse theory - there will be people and families who will choose to emigrate to other planets - much as we do countries.
In this scenario - there will be those who look upon those who have chosen to move to Earth as their particular choice with the same semi-envy and wonderment as many do those who move countries. What will it be and feel like over there? What kind of atmosphere, what kind of climate - what will it feel like to interact with its geography? And yes - Earthlings.
And Lo - I am right now experiencing this planet in all of these ways!!
It doesn’t matter what country I happen to have alighted on - wherever I go here, I am on Earth - I am exploring planet Earth from my particular standpoint. That is the stupendous and over-arching fact about my existence right now!
Heck - there are schools of thought which believe that I did literally choose Earth as a destination (à la the animated film ‘Soul’). Where that is so - the amazement is ever the more awe-inspiring.
There are also many different ways to explore something. I don’t have necessarily to scour the surface for all the surfacial differences - I might choose instead to commit to a particular locus and get to know it deeply, across time as well as all the other more usual regards.
The upshot of all of this is - I am more than happy to have landed my particular patch on Earth, and will explore it and appreciate it the way any new visitor to any planet might.
There will never be a paywall, as I don’t write here often enough to warrant a paid subscription.
I write here purely to convey thoughts which I think are worth conveying
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