![]() ![]() Apwas the day I set off and if you had asked me then whether I’d be at it still, I’d have answered with a resounding no. This week, I ran into an old friend I hadn’t seen since 1998 who happened to be visiting Chiang Mai. As a result, I don’t have a wistfulness for a specific place or a specific person – though surely we each have memories that bring back those kinds of wistful feelings – but a more existential nostalgia for the confluence of Really Great Things. Perhaps it’s temporary, claiming that happiness as my own, but it happens often as I wander. If that’s not happiness, I don’t know what is. What stands out above all else is the perfect storm of moments when everything aligns – people you care about, helping others, a place you love, delicious food, learning learning – so much learning. The good and the bad are each knotted together into a safety net, trapping anything that falls between. But I suspect none of us would trade in the lives we’ve built for a different one.Īs homesickness goes, when I think of these last years I feel wistful for nothing and everything, all at once. (I say physical because technology enables us all to have perpetually accessible communities.) When I think of my friends at home, I do envy the consistency of their interaction. There are repercussions to doing this with frequency, too – if you keep leaving parts of yourself around the world, what’s left to leave? And is there a way to go back eventually and collect all the pieces? Crispin acknowledges that there are advantages and repercussions to the yearning for elsewhere, trade-offs that are deeply personal to each of those who move. For me, they lie in the lack of stability and traditional societal goals: having one home, having a physical community around you that remains more or less the same. On my end, I certainly do think we leave a part of us in each of the places we visit. It was only when she returned to North America and was asked to explain her choices that she panicked, quickly picking one of a few favourite cities to say “this is the place for me.” “You are constantly out of your comfort zone” he noted “until you’re not.” Another friend said she stopped trying to understand why she felt homesick despite having no city or place that felt like home. Another saw his life as a series of Russian dolls, starting with a splash of colour and radiating outward, new dolls over the old, each representing a place lived, a lesson learned. But of course people change, and intellectually he knows that is the case. When he found himself in those smaller places again, it felt jarring, as though the prior iteration – the person he remembered – was the one that should have reappeared. One friend noted that while some places are big enough to absorb memories and return to, others aren’t the smaller places are indelibly tied to a memory or a former version of himself, impossible to recover. We finally capped off the communication when we realized we could go on for days – there was work to be done after all! While I tend to speak to these friends often, it was wonderful to take a much deeper look at our respective lives, and learn more about one another in the process. How are we different than we were when we set off? Have our values changed? Have the ways we relate to people (and things) shifted over the years? And can we really get homesick when we technically have no fixed address? One of my favourites from Thailand: a tree at dusk near Doi Suthep, Chiang Mai Can ‘modern nomads’ feel homesickness if they travel with no base?įrom one short article, our email exchanges sprawled outward into existential questions about life and happiness, about what home means and about the choices we each made to end up where we did. We started writing to one another about our own memories of places, about what longer-term travel does to an entrenched worldview. In turn, sending the article sparked a series of in-depth and thoughtful conversations with these fellow travellers. Crispin’s review resonated with me, enough so that I shared it with a few of my friends who are also living abroad. A return several years later left her feeling disoriented – the city had changed – and longing for an intense connection to the Ireland of her memories, a place that might not have existed other than in retrospect. “ I was there simply to test the limits of my leash” she notes, telling us about her first prolonged trip abroad. Matt’s history of homesickness in America, Jessa Crispin uses the subject as a springboard for her own travels and nostalgia. A recent article in Smart Set caught my attention. ![]()
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