Thinking Aloud: Stranger in a Strange Land

I'm going to write a personal post. I don't do it very often because I feel like these thoughts don't really fit into the feeling we had in mind for these pages.

The problem with that is that our internal lives are like a set of lenses we see everything through – some days rosy, some blue, sometimes like a crazy hall of mirrors.

It's only been 6 months since Doug and I arrived in Southeast Asia, but I feel that this journey began for me more than 5 years ago, when I was 23 years old and I booked a flight to Canada.

Back then I had been working for the same company for 2½ years. I'd been in the same apartment for 18 months, in the same relationship since I was 18. I had a lot of friends who I related to, who were living similar lives to me. I had a lot of understandably naive notions about myself, other people and the world we live in. I left partly because I thought I could define myself by rebellion, by the things I didn't want – a car, a mortgage, a husband, kids, a career...

Some of you know the next part of the story. For the next couple of years I flitted around Canada, Mexico and Japan. I came home still burning with ideas about separating myself from those things and I worked feverishly for 6 months, coming home to a hole of an apartment in the far west of the city. I saved the money to buy my house in Muttaburra and I became a lifeguard, I studied philosophy, painted my walls and tried to figure out what purpose I should give myself. Then I met Doug and soon I went to be with him, waiting while he struggled to change his own life – sell his business, stabilise his relationships with his kids, deal with the illness and then the death of his father. Since then the roller-coaster has taken us through a very different part of the world, but some questions are still the same.

We still have a lot to do before we'll be returning to the bosom/claws of the nation we were born to. It will be another 6 months at least before I'll be looking for a new job, a place to live in another new city. Most days I talk to old friends, people I met before and during this 5+ years of surreal adventure. We talk about their careers, their marriages and kids, their homes. A lot has changed for them too, but it sounds like a steady-enough progression through a life they already had planned for themselves long ago.

I still don't want those things. I'm just not the type to want them and I'm thankful every day that I've lived true to my heart. I no longer believe I can define myself that way however – a lack of strings does not a person make.

So now I'm rolling the future scenario over my tongue, tasting what it will be like to crash-land in a reality I haven't faced for a long time. I'll be 29 years old then. I am already utterly different from the 23 year old who handled that reality with confidence and ease. I've got natural hair now and casual roughies have replaced bottle, big boots and baby-dolls featuring skulls and the logos of idm bands (I was so sure of myself). I still have my personal record – never applied for a job I haven't been offered – but I haven't applied for a job in over 3 years. I've had no schedules, no pressures.

Then there's Doug. I'm still every bit as in-love with him as I was when we met and I love being with him. It still blows me away every time I look at him and realise that he is not going anywhere without me, that he won't dissolve, that I'll get to share all of this newness with this amazing person. But what kind of a partner will I be when the dust settles, when everything is more permanent? The person that I am now has never had to be steady or to liven up what is boring (it's never boring) or juggle a partner and a job.

I'm not afraid. I'm lucky, because life has never given me any reasons to be afraid. I've always landed on my feet – always been surprised mid-fall by the tumble and the sudden rearrangement of everything beneath me until it looks a lot less scary down there. Maybe that's the power of slipping in a new lens, beginning a new internal life at the moment when everything external is upside-down.

So now I'm looking out on a future landscape and I can see the Middle East, and then Central and East Asia. Beyond that there's something vague, but fresh and shining visible on the horizon - and I'm excited about meeting it there. We are all so adaptable. An indistinct future may seem a little scary and fill us with doubt, but the present is all about perspective. When the future becomes the present we're too busy being there, getting on with things to worry about it.

It's good to be alive :)