Uncertainty

8.27.08

“All these people who wrote of my life both inner and outer wrote with an absolute assurance that I had never felt.”  -Ernest Hemingway

 

            I have never felt assurance in my life.  I have always been concerned with how things would ebb and flow.  How they would shift beneath my feet or the room would spin around me. I’ve always been aware of how everything can be taken away.  How in my reality nothing is eternal.   I find in myself these thoughts that at any moment I won’t be able to go back home (wherever, whatever that may be?), that all I have will be gone, that those I love will be no more or at least not with me.  While I have this family unit that is mostly free from divorce and all lives in the same tiny area of the world I still have experiences of distance from people and an overwhelming amount of short-term relationships. 

As far as I know I have always been standing on some kind of dry, shifting soil that refuses to let life dig deep with it roots.  I have a family.  Parents that are not divorced.  I lived in the same town, the same house even, my entire life.  And still, security is a word that has always been slightly allusive to me.   Something in me never allowed myself to feel at home.  In my memories I only ever remember shadows of home.  Being someplace that I really know isn’t home, but yet brings me the sense that it is close.  These moments are usually when the scent of salt water fills the air and there are mountains in view.  It has also happened in a small cottage in the mountains of New Zealand surrounded by a family and fireplace.  Every once in a while I find a leather sofa that bears some resemblance to what I believe home could be; but these things were not my roots, the history does not exist in them. 

This is something deep and personal to me.  If my parents and family knew I felt this way they would feel betrayed.  They seem to have a very different view of what my quaint life was. It was full of Christmases and birthday parties and family and happiness and all these things that I simply thought were agonizing or non-existent.   

When I was seventeen I left.  I didn’t run away.  I wasn’t kicked out.  I just left and moved to the next town.  I stepped out on my own as much as I could.  I got to a point when I knew that it wasn’t far enough away.  So I hopped on a plane and flew as far as I could.  I landed in New Zealand and then found my way around the world.  I was surrounded by this makeshift family that I love dearly, but still felt in many ways, very much alone.  As I wound my way around Earth I stopped back in at home, feeling more out of place than ever.  I then packed up one more time and headed for New Zealand again. 

It was in New Zealand that things started to resemble what I suppose “home” should be, but with a major difference.  Now people who came and went just like me surrounded me, only I was planted for a little while.  Thus began an overwhelming amount of people coming and going and while I felt roots beginning to penetrate, the seasons came and went with such a great harshness that the roots were scared to grow and were never fully as strong as maybe they could have been. 

            Here I stand at age twenty-four completely unsure of everything.  I own a very dilapidated wardrobe, some books, a backpack, a laptop and recently acquired a fifty dollar couch.  I borrow my friend’s mattress and I sleep on the floor.  For the last six years I have lived semi-nomadic having slept in fifteen bedrooms that were considered my own (that is not counting three months of mission bases and hostels across the globe).  A year is so long that it makes me ill just thinking about it, therefore commitments are not long ones.  I live in a city that I have never been to before.  I’ve been here four weeks and still don’t have a job.  My money is gone, my friends and I have histories of three weeks, with the exception of one, but we have spent most our relatively short friendship on different continents.   

            For me I guess, life is what is in front of me.  My identity is caught up in what I do.  So when I don’t do anything, then I am nothing.   The part of me that is calm and rational (very small part) knows that this is nonsense.  That actually I am not what I do.  Sadly the other personalities rioting inside of me don’t spend enough time with calm and rational.   My friends are those in front of me.  I have many relationships with people who find themselves all over the world and many of them I love very deeply, but my immediate is my reality.  It is very rare for me to really miss someone, and almost as rare for me to miss a place. 

            So there a few things I seem to feel I am missing.  Security and home I seem to equate with each other.  And yet I am missing the thing, whatever it may be, that makes me want to stay anywhere longer than a couple months.  I seem to fill my backpack with these roots that long for fertile soil.  I have yet to discover a place where they even want to be rooted. 

            What I’ve done is shut the door and started over.  This is the first and only conclusion I have ever come to.  I guess the door is a very solid thing in my mind, but the things that lie on either side of that door are unknown and blurry.