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My village, my home
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Like many people,
I've traveled. A lot.
When you travel a lot (travel is touted as a "bug that bites deep",
so if you've been bitten, you know what I'm saying), there's always
the next place to look forward to. There are always the next travel
plans to make. There's all the arranging, and all the re-allocating
of the time and the resources from whatever's going on here and
now, to travel to and enjoy being somewhere else.
Sometime around about now (I can't say precisely when it
happened,
but sometime around NOW), the wind suddenly went out of my
travel sails. One moment I was a serial traveler. The next moment,
travel was the last thing on my mind. It dawned on me I had set
myself up to only live in the here and now while en
route to somewhere else (so to speak). It was more than that
actually. It was I realized there were elements of
avoiding being in the here and now, elements which
were fundamental to all my travels, elements which traveling
satisfied.
When I got that, a new
relationship
with travel began - more dramatically, a new
relationship
with the place in which I live,
this place I call "home" which I always left to travel, began. To
say I started to see it as if for the first time, is an
understatement. It's I started to appreciate it for
the first time. When it hit me, I literally gasped "I
live here. I really live here. This is my village,
my home!". What got me is even though I've lived here for
nearly thirty years, it took me this long to get that. Wow!
There's my favorite diner where the waitresses all know me, where I
take my laptop before dawn, and write while having an omelet, and
drinking bottomless cups of decaf. There's my gym where they know
which locker key to give me (I'm a creature of habit). There's my
car guy / mechanic, the park in which I hike, the hillside place
with the
magnificent
view where I like to go just because it's there. There's my
doctor, my hairstylist, my finance guy, my friends, my post office,
my grocery. I'm comfortable here. Any place else is just another
place else. I didn't get it until now. Oh I got it
intellectually - but I never got it. No,
not until here, not until now.
It's profound, this allowing this place to be home. Of course,
allowing any place to be home, is profound. But it's
allowing this place to be my home, that's profound.
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