Tuesday, September 4, 2007

Labor Day Weekend II

Being back in London for the weekend was good. Familiar and comforting. It felt as though I'd had a really good holiday away and then returned home. There are many reasons to consider London home. All my friends. My flat. My ability to walk around most parts of London without getting too lost. Borough Market. Fresco juice. Steamed egg. Crisp white sheets from The White Company. My London work environment. Did I mention all my friends?

Being back in NY was weird initially. Everything looked familiar but so strange.

I got thinkin about whether I would move back to London, and if so, when? I have no answers yet, but this quote does sum up my thoughts quite well.

”I yearn to settle now, to exchange the departure lounge for the drawing room, to stay somewhere where customs means no more than habits, to forget the tempting scents of Heathrow jet fuel and Punjabi wood smoke and settle instead for my own rose garden……But can I settle? And if I can – if kerosene and cooking fires and Kenyan mud are scents that will never lure me again – then where on earth, do I settle? I like it all in truth. Not Equatorial Guinea, perhaps, where once this newspaper sent me to write a profile of the World’s Worst Country; but elsewhere. I could live and die, quite happily in 100 places or more._
Am I doomed, like Buridan’s Ass, to hesitate ceaselessly between the equally alluring temptations of the myriad places I know, and in the end perish of place-starvation and location-thirst, unable to make up my mind?…………..Will this one (place) be right? Will this one be home? Might this, at last, be the Great Good Place? Or will the siren call of somewhere else sound once again and make this place, and the person I am going there with, be just as temporary as all before? ” - Simon Winchester

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I very much enjoyed reading your blog, as a fellow aSWer, your experience very much resonates with my own: Born in China, grew up in Canada, educated in UK, (had long distance boyfriend, now ex in NYC) and then moved to Singapore (for an investment bank) where i did not know a single soul.. it's nice to know that someone else is experiencing the same joys and pains of living a global life... the same optimism when it comes to dating even after you are heart-broken and dissapointed time and again. it makes me feel less alone.

It’s so hard you know, to repeat the same story over and over again; to meet strangers, become friends, and separate like strangers again; to cross oceans and not know much about the place where you will end up, the people you will meet, the joy you will experience or the hardships that you will have to endure.

Thanks for the blog, who knows, maybe see you at some point on an aSW event.

ciao