As I write this title I hesitate, this does not feel like a return, it feels like I have left home and am starting over… again. I just came ‘back’ from living in Ecuador for three years. Where I am now is Austria, where I grew up.
As many, if not most, who read this may know from their own experience, moving to live in different cities or countries is both exciting and challenging. You have to find new friends, the best locations to buy things and to go out, understand the culture, maybe learn a new language, get involved locally and connect with people etc. etc. It is hard work at the beginning, but it pays off. You find people who you cannot imagine living without and you connect to the place in such a way that you call it home.
Almost everyone these days lives and works outside the city or country they were born in, the movement of people has increased and we live more and more transitory and international lives. This is wonderful of course, we have so many opportunities to experience new things and see the world. But the challenges are also real, we connect and disconnect from people and places over and over again. And we are confronted with many questions. Are our roots weaker now? Do we connect and disconnect too easily? Can we be happy living in one place, without the excitement of moving again and connecting with yet another place and set of people? If we move, are we running away from something?
All of these and many more questions float around in my head as I write. So to pick one, allow me to talk about life skills. Apart from experiences, fantastic trips and miles on our back, what do we bring with us when we return? We have learned how to find our feet in a new place, we have learned about the local culture and learned to live with it, we have learned to connect with people and to create a life. In theory, we can apply these life skills to any new situation, and practice makes perfect, right? This is true, but there are situations when this is harder. Returning home, the home you left some time in the past, is not a real return, all the life skills of moving abroad have to be used again here. The situation has changed, the people have changed, and most of all you are not the same. So while we can apply the life skills here, we face resistance from our own mind. We face our own memory of how things were and about what role we played among friends or in the family before we left. Furthermore, we are probably not as excited about the next new adventure… at home. Wouldn’t it be a lot more fun to start a new life in Kenya?
So what should we do? Maybe the answer is to see the uniqueness and temporality of every moment, whether we are in Ecuador, Austria or Kenya. Maybe it is to appreciate the challenges of finding our own space everywhere we go and to let ourselves be surprised by what the present moment has in stall for us.
It is often said that a home is not a specific place, it is people. But most of all a home is you. You make it, you have to create it and it depends only on you (this ‘you’ can of course include your partner etc.). I would also add that a home is a moment, it is not in the past nor the future. We have to let go of our old homes to create a new one, and we cannot spend time imagining future homes because we might miss the present one.
With this I want to share one of my favourite things from Quito with you, the evening sky. Quito has such an amazing sky with deep colours and fantastic scenes that change quickly. Watching those skies was so often my ‘home’ moment.
My beloved Quito night view with several window reflections.
Love,
Chiara