This nomadic existence...

Sigh. Here I am again, getting ready to move across the oceans. 25 years and how many times have I done this? I used to think (back when I started college) that I would just love to find a place to call home. Settle down, put down some roots, buy a house - in short, never move again. Now I am less sure. Back then I was searching for a place to call home, a place to truly belong. Now I think differently. Belonging, after all, is for the weak (sounds Nietzschean, doesn't it?) I kid. This nomadic existence, I have since realized, is going to prevent me from belonging. And that's OK. The struggle then, is to keep from falling into a belonging, to keep from morphing into a label that the world would find convenient to put me under. After all, it doesn't matter to me that I can't truly say "where" I'm from. I don't know any different. It is this bureaucratic system of nation-states, identity politics, ethnicities and religions that insists that we identify with a piece of paper that was handed to us due to an accident of birth. And for this accident of birth, I am being uprooted from the place I had come to feel at home, and being sent somewhere that technically should be my home. Nevermind the friends and family, the lives and loves I leave behind. Nevermind that I have lived there for only 4 of my living years, and here for 12. In this world of ever increasing globalization two things are clear to me: one, that we can exist under this system of nation states and paper-based citizenship only so long, that is, if we are to truly globalize; and two, that the "global world" remains ever more accessible to those lucky enough to be born in the First world, the Developed world, the Western Hemisphere. The barriers facing the rest, even in making a choice to move for employment, are unfathomable to those who have never had to stare down immigration officials. Globalization, in the true sense, remains a farce.

Catapulted at the whim of bureaucracy, everywhere I leave I take something with me, and everywhere I live, I leave part of me behind. Just yesterday I longed for Texas as I walked down the streets of Boston. And the day before that, as we were all treated to an early, chilly fall, I enjoyed yet another malted vanilla malt milkshake from Herrell's as I walked down Harvard Square, only if I closed my eyes, I could have sworn I was back in Northampton. So we come full-circle :) Some days I walk across the Public Gardens and see them as part of a seperate world, a world in which I am no longer visible. They appear to me as if from a movie screen; I am merely a spectator. Almost a year after I moved here, I am now preparing to say goodbye once again. One hopes it will be a short-lived goodbye, a hiatus, if you will. Only time will tell. Last year I had thought I had finally landed in the place I was going to call my home. This year, I am less sure. Even I cannot evade my nomadic existence too long.