and ending up... (w)here
on this Venture Forth attitude, i left college and did the europe thing with my best friend and then moved to egypt and traveled traveled traveled- and wrote tons of emails about where i went and what i saw and what i thought about all of that... and when, after a year and a half, my time in cairo was coming to an end, i said that although the sorts of adventures i had been having would stop for a while, the emails would keep coming...
i was wrong.
the emails did not keep coming. in fact, it's been about a year since my last mass email. and recently i find myself asking why...? i can say that coming back to chicago has been nice- i've almost finished this master's in english literature; i've reconnected (or connected for the first time) with a lot of people who are part of my earliest memories- i've even fallen in love with one of them and realized that the whole marriage issue isn't really so scary if it's to your best friend; in short i've invested myself in being here, in chicago, at home, in a way i never really did or could have when i was in college or in egypt- i've come to accept that i am, for the time being, here to stay.
of course, "here to stay" seems a little daunting to me when i think of the life i was living a year ago- then, if i had five days off, i sped off to a different country without thinking too much or planning too much. now there are so many obstacles to getting up and getting out that i feel depressingly tied down. everyone around me seems to be tangled up in their schedules and their notions of traveling as being an expensive thing to do and the overwhelming inertia of daily motions that don't allow for any haphazard and unscheduled hopping about.
but then all of this makes it seem like my lack of mass-email in the last year is due to the fact that i haven't traveled much; i don't know if that's really it. i'm sure it's part of it, but when i think of my attitude when i lived in egypt, it's very different from the one in which i now find myself mired. i suppose everyone goes through a stage in which they must resolve putting down roots to not feeling tied down; i'm beginning to do that. it's not that i'm lacking in inspiration- rather at times i'm bursting with it, but without the structure that my travels lent to my narratives, i am usually at a loss as to how to express that which is inspiring in my everyday.
when i left egypt, i said the following:
"perhaps what is painful in leaving egypt is that although i know i can return to the place, that it won't fade away and disappear once i fly away, i have come to love the WAY i live. that is, living here, i can't operate on cruise control. it's impossible. to drift through life here would mean getting run over within five minutes. instead i'm constantly being tested, being forced to observe, being surprised, being faced with mini-obstacles. i have very rarely felt as though i'd seen it all or that there was nothing new to discover. and often i've surprised myself: "learning what you know is something you have to do everyday, every moment." the thought of going back to chicago and re-adopting a blase attitude is sickening. and yet perhaps egypt will have taught me to really see chicago. perhaps egypt has taught me to really see."
well, returning to chicago has been what i meant it to be when i wrote that passage; i've succeeded in retaining a lot of the perspective i gained while i was there. but i haven't been able to express it as easily; that flowing articulation of my own vision is, for the moment, gone. it's as though i've lost access to that narrative frame which allowed me to take my readers on a spiritual or an emotional journey with me as i entertained them with tales of my last trip, because physically, geographically, i am not on any journeys. i'm stuck. and thus this itch to write in my former inspired way manifests itself as an itch to travel.
"eventually, however, she manages to resist the old lie that life abroad is more real. It's just that the stores are less familiar and therefore harder to ignore." i got that quote from michael ondaatje's book, "the english patient." when i read it, it struck me as so true.
and hence the title of this blog- latitude... attitude... does the Where necessarily affect the Whats, the Whys, the Hows of my life? in the last year i've been overwhelmed at times by a feeling of restlessness- a desire to run far, far away from this predictable life and jump back into the arms of dusty third world chaos. am i just bored? or am i really, really bored?
on this Venture Forth attitude, i left college and did the europe thing with my best friend and then moved to egypt and traveled traveled traveled- and wrote tons of emails about where i went and what i saw and what i thought about all of that... and when, after a year and a half, my time in cairo was coming to an end, i said that although the sorts of adventures i had been having would stop for a while, the emails would keep coming...
i was wrong.
the emails did not keep coming. in fact, it's been about a year since my last mass email. and recently i find myself asking why...? i can say that coming back to chicago has been nice- i've almost finished this master's in english literature; i've reconnected (or connected for the first time) with a lot of people who are part of my earliest memories- i've even fallen in love with one of them and realized that the whole marriage issue isn't really so scary if it's to your best friend; in short i've invested myself in being here, in chicago, at home, in a way i never really did or could have when i was in college or in egypt- i've come to accept that i am, for the time being, here to stay.
of course, "here to stay" seems a little daunting to me when i think of the life i was living a year ago- then, if i had five days off, i sped off to a different country without thinking too much or planning too much. now there are so many obstacles to getting up and getting out that i feel depressingly tied down. everyone around me seems to be tangled up in their schedules and their notions of traveling as being an expensive thing to do and the overwhelming inertia of daily motions that don't allow for any haphazard and unscheduled hopping about.
but then all of this makes it seem like my lack of mass-email in the last year is due to the fact that i haven't traveled much; i don't know if that's really it. i'm sure it's part of it, but when i think of my attitude when i lived in egypt, it's very different from the one in which i now find myself mired. i suppose everyone goes through a stage in which they must resolve putting down roots to not feeling tied down; i'm beginning to do that. it's not that i'm lacking in inspiration- rather at times i'm bursting with it, but without the structure that my travels lent to my narratives, i am usually at a loss as to how to express that which is inspiring in my everyday.
when i left egypt, i said the following:
"perhaps what is painful in leaving egypt is that although i know i can return to the place, that it won't fade away and disappear once i fly away, i have come to love the WAY i live. that is, living here, i can't operate on cruise control. it's impossible. to drift through life here would mean getting run over within five minutes. instead i'm constantly being tested, being forced to observe, being surprised, being faced with mini-obstacles. i have very rarely felt as though i'd seen it all or that there was nothing new to discover. and often i've surprised myself: "learning what you know is something you have to do everyday, every moment." the thought of going back to chicago and re-adopting a blase attitude is sickening. and yet perhaps egypt will have taught me to really see chicago. perhaps egypt has taught me to really see."
well, returning to chicago has been what i meant it to be when i wrote that passage; i've succeeded in retaining a lot of the perspective i gained while i was there. but i haven't been able to express it as easily; that flowing articulation of my own vision is, for the moment, gone. it's as though i've lost access to that narrative frame which allowed me to take my readers on a spiritual or an emotional journey with me as i entertained them with tales of my last trip, because physically, geographically, i am not on any journeys. i'm stuck. and thus this itch to write in my former inspired way manifests itself as an itch to travel.
"eventually, however, she manages to resist the old lie that life abroad is more real. It's just that the stores are less familiar and therefore harder to ignore." i got that quote from michael ondaatje's book, "the english patient." when i read it, it struck me as so true.
and hence the title of this blog- latitude... attitude... does the Where necessarily affect the Whats, the Whys, the Hows of my life? in the last year i've been overwhelmed at times by a feeling of restlessness- a desire to run far, far away from this predictable life and jump back into the arms of dusty third world chaos. am i just bored? or am i really, really bored?
...Natural is the static
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