Where I find myself

I think I will never be satisfied. It's a blessing and a curse. I want to see the world, breath it in, see it all. But I want to settle in, send down roots, have a family. It is much like the concept of Yin and Yang, each in opposition to each-other, but in compliment. One cannot exists without the other. I cannot exists without both. They take turns within me. Each clamoring for my attention. Each having to take turns.


This time last year, I was packing up all I had in life, getting ready to move back to the country I call home. But it didn't feel like home. It felt like a foreign land of excess and convenience. Where my own language hurt my ears and overwhelmed me because suddenly I could understand everything that was being said. The sweet silence of ignorance had been robbed from me. I found myself searching for the sing-song roughness of the Chinese language that I had grown accustomed to ignoring. Here understanding was forced on me. Familiarity bred contempt and I wanted earplugs.


There are so many things to love about America, so many things I had missed. Like green grass, and Taco Bell, big trucks, and being able to drive. So many things you can do here that you cannot do else where and that I wanted to do. But leaving Hong Kong broke my heart. It's uniqueness, it's intensity, the memories, the people. I cried as our jet plane dipped its wings to the South and the Hong Kong skyline disappeared below me. I left part of my heart there...and I felt it leave me. When you love in life, you hurt. And I had loved living in Hong Kong.

I suppose I could have withstrained myself, I knew it was only temporary, but to fall in love with a place, or even a person, and withstrain yourself from investing your heart because of safety issues; is to limit yourself to mere surface level understanding. To get dirty in something, someone, to see all that it is, they are, is to love them. And I loved living in Hong Kong.

To be outside of my comfort zone, is to be in my comfort zone...to challenge normality. Here? here I'm somewhat normal. And its hard. Hard feeling tied to a place. Hard knowing that people expect things of me that I am not qualified to deliver. It's even hard driving two minutes to the grocery store and having my pick of five different kinds of taco sauce...hard because it's so easy. In Hong Kong, taco sauce came by an epic journey of an hour by three different modes of transportation and a mile of walking, till you found the one store, that had the one kind....and let me tell you, there was nothing better then that one kind of hard earned taco sauce.

But it's wonderful here too, wonderful because it is also unique. Only in America can you sit in the grandstands of Fenway park and watch the Redsox play ball and sing the national anthem to the flag flying under the Coca Cola sign. Only in America can you live in a four bedroom, two and a half bath house and still refer to it as small. Only in America, am I truly an American. And I love my country.

Come to think about it, I love every place I've lived. I've loved Montana because it's where I found myself grounded in simplicity and drawn to adventure. And I've loved Tennessee because its where I found myself learning how to slow down for relationships, for life. And I've loved Connecticut because it's where I found myself learning that people can change and hope is stronger then desperation. And I loved Hong Kong because it's where I found myself intoxicated with life's complexity and how small I really am. And I love South Lancaster Massachusetts, because...it's where I find myself.