Uproot Yuhself

If there is one thing that keeps me going, it would be moving, literally from one place to another. I've journeyed from London to Macedonia to Guyana to New York to San Francisco in 4 years and the itch is still there. Maybe it's because I count NY and CA as one really long hiatus (since they're in the same country), which has fed into my longing for some new adventure. Maybe it just runs through my veins?--passed through from my globe-trotting mother's umbilical cord into my hard wiring.

My siblings and I were raised as global citizens and I am indebted to my parents for making me see the world as one gigantic neighborhood, and not a bunch of gated communities filled with wretched xenophobes and inferior cultures. I consider this as quite a feat on their part as progressive parents raising a family in the Philippines--a conservative Roman Catholic country, far far away from the love-crazed, free-spirited, tree-hugging hippies of San Francisco. I have always wanted to see this city, and never thought that one day I would actually be living in it. It's definitely showed me a whacky side to the US--everyone's got to try it.

Yet I still cannot fight the urge to try out new places. Traveling does not satiate this appetite of mine--I need to actually move. There's only so much one can truly absorb in a 3 to 4 week holiday before it's time to pack up and go home--leaving behind a small trace of yourself, and taking away nothing but a superficial imprint of another world in your mind's eye. On the other hand, moving somewhere to live for sometime is an entirely different package deal. You see, you observe, you absorb, you learn, and then you have to deal. Cultural difference no longer pertains to light-hearted amusement. You have to learn to live with it in ways you never had to before. It's actually a really hard thing to do, especially being as hard headed as I am. There is no three-clicks-of-your-slippers and you're back in Kansas, safe and sound.

But I do wonder whether my need to be in constant transition is my own version of three-clicks-to-Kansas. I click my heels to get out too. And by clicking them every x years or so I find myself somewhere new where I am able to reinvent myself over and over again. Maybe, the same fears that keep some of us rooted, are also those that keep others in constant uprootedness. Moving is just another kind of escape route really--a state of statelessness; a suspension of reality. The novelty of the new can be addicting. Perhaps my real challenge is staying put for a while to see how real things can get.