Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabriel Zevin
“To return to the city of one’s birth always felt like a retreat.”
That’s the second time this book has used that line. Foreshadowing.
It seemed so odd to me, it stayed with me when most single lines wouldn’t. Why would returning home feel like retreat?
Everywhere is in constant change and at an ever increasing rate. Revelations appear around once familiar corners. It’s exhilarating to keep making discoveries and feels like travel, while simultaneously allowing for the renewing of long lasting connections and feeling comfortingly like home. It’s a joy….. mostly.
It can have a downside too, and sometimes the total overwhelm, I will concede, is …… well overwhelming.
Too many memories.
Too many social events.
Too much to be achieved.
Too many time constraints.
Defeat or retreat has never entered into it for me.
“Midnight Train” by Matt Haig
“I’d always thought if I came back it would feel like a defeat, but it doesn’t … I feel like it’s the most natural thing in the world. I mean look at this place. Look at these people. “
And then this comes up in yet another book and suddenly it occurs to me that the reflection and analysis I had written about several days ago, missed the point entirely. These characters were referring to returning to hometowns to live and I had been comparing their perceptions to our trips home.
Travel is a completely different personal experience.
In some ways they are right. I do not wish to return to my hometown to live right now and yes some part of me has believed that that would be defeat. Honestly I can now say that the last trip home changed that perception for me.
I have finally seen the new possibilities of once again living in a place, which I had perhaps run away from, as much as I had run to something I found so very much more fulfilling and forgiving.
Adelaide is not the same place I left. That is certainly true and there are many more hugely appealing aspects to life in the city there, than there once were. There are also opportunities now that didn’t exist before and some that I am so much more able to engage in at this point. There are issues I would like to be able to have more of an impact on, than is possible from a distance. Most certainly high on the list being concern about the environment and specifically the preservation of our magnificent parkland belt. Being able to meaningfully engage is appealing.
More than anything it is the overwhelming sense of connection to family and friends, that means for the first time in very many years I do not see returning home as taking refuge or recovering from some kind of personal disaster. It will become a choice not just an eventuality.
I finally thought I could happily live there and might even want to at some point in the future. That is not to say it is a plan at this stage because we actually do, truly love the life and lifestyle we have here, but it is to accept, that it is a possibility and a very pleasant one.
