Always There and Never Here

I realized that all of this time, I have had the view that until one finds the perfect place to call home and put down roots, they can never quite be settled or content in life. Even though I fundamentally knew quite early on that Utopia does not exist, and even though I knew fundamentally that “the grass is always greener on the other side”, I still held on to the belief that I had to get as close to perfection as possible before I put down roots. It never really felt impractical to me, to be fair. Utopia felt impractical. But holding on to the idea of a nearly perfect city until putting down roots seemed practical. 

I can see it’s not that way now, looking back, but I couldn’t see this at the time. Kierkegaard says that life can only be understood looking backwards, but it has to be lived moving forwards. That much has certainly been true in my life. 

I don’t know how I came to adopt this view – I seemed to have been holding on to it for as long as I can remember. Ever since I was a kiddo. I don’t know what all that is about. I don’t know where I got the notion. It was probably from being raised by my parents, or by a message I got from a television show somewhere along the way. I’m sure a psychoanalyst could point it out for me, if I paid him enough money. 

I had traveled all over by the time I found myself in my early 30s. I had been on a few missions trips and family vacations in my younger and more vulnerable high school years, and I had visited a few other states during college, and a few more after college. I had gone out and seen the wide world since then. I taught English and volunteered all around Asia, and I explored the greater countries and more prominent cities of Europe and the U.K. in my late 20s. And this felt right. This felt like the right thing to do, given the opportunities that came my way. Given the time and the freedom to explore. 

And I found myself in my early to mid 30s, stuck in a nowhere town, in the sticks of the States, and wondering to myself, ‘Now what?’ I was entirely on my own. I was on the path, and the path was ever before me. It reached out for miles and miles and miles. I was forever set on the path, and it wasn’t a halfway bad path, to be fair. But it was still the ever-lasting path, the path that led ever on until retirement or death came. And the path was also riddled with constant and unnaturally high frequencies of anxiety, stress, and obsessions. And the path was also riddled with insecurities, and plenty of loneliness. The isolation and comfort of my own place started as a good thing, a good thing to protect oneself from the terrors and anxieties of the outside world and of all unpleasant people, but it soon got to be out of hand. No one came along to stop up the gaps. 

I sat at a cafe one day, journaling away and working on my fourth cup of drip coffee, and I thought of all the places I had traveled to. All of the places I had explored, and a few of the places I spent a month or two living in. Los Angeles. Seattle. Portland. Newberg. Salem. New York. Orlando. San Diego. San Antonio. Philadelphia. Beijing. Wuhan. Xian. Angkor Wat. Chiang Mai. Bangkok. Ho Chi Minh City. Athens. Vienna. Prague. Venice. Rome. Florence. Paris. Bruges. Brussels. Copenhagen. London. Oxford. Bath. Edinburgh. Dublin. And I thought to myself, in the midst of all this, ‘Wow. How wonderful it is that I have experienced all of these beautiful places. And I don’t want to live in a single one of them. I don’t even want to revisit any of these places. And on top of all of this, I have no desire to visit any other places on God’s green earth. I’m good.’

I’m good. I’m all good. 

So. Now what?

I sat there at the coffee table, the half empty fourth cup of drip coffee sitting next to me, and I just stared down at those three words I had written down in my journal. “So. Now what?” One could say that I meditated on those three words. Lectio Divina. I had no idea how to answer the question. 

I was on the path I had chosen. I was on the long path I had chosen, that eventually led to retirement or death. One of the two. And I had officially visited all of the places in my life that I ever wanted to visit. I had seen it all. I had not officially “seen it all”, but I had seen everything on God’s green earth that I wanted to see. I was grateful. But I was also left at a loss. What now?

Another question that I could have written in my journal, after “so, now what” would be the question “Is this it?” 

Is this it? 

After all my explorations and struggles, dreams and desires, all my hard work….is this really it?

And I sat there at the cafe table pondering that question as well, feeling decently disappointed. 

I would have thought that, by now, I would at least have had a girlfriend. Hopefully a serious girlfriend or a fiancé, but at the very least, a girlfriend of some kind. A woman with a pulse who could move all of her limbs and didn’t have a lazy eye. Was that too much to ask, after all the struggle and life I had been through? 

I thought of the prospect of kids, of starting a family. Continuing the family line sounded nice (it was ultimately up to me to pass on the family name), but the actual reality of having children sounded positively awful. Why on earth would someone do that to themselves willingly? Good Lord, human beings could be stupid sometimes. Or perhaps, a correction to that statement: human beings could continually be stupid a lot of the time. So having kids was clearly out of the equation. Passing on the family name wasn’t enough of a reason to bring that horrendous and eternal burden upon myself. 

But to have a partner of some kind. A partner who I could be on the same wavelength with, who could be a best friend to me on this path. One would have thought that that would be a reasonable ask. One would have thought that that would be a fair trade for all the darkness I had encountered in my relatively short lifespan. 

But, as they say, “the Lord works in mysterious ways.” Or maybe He doesn’t work at all. Maybe He doesn’t exist at all. Maybe, contrary to what I was raised to believe, we’re all just on our own figuring things out and trying to make the best of things. And maybe a good chunk of the population uses that freewill for evil. Who knows. Who’s to say. 

I thought about the idea of Utopia, and the idea that hopefully someplace out there was pretty darn close to Utopia for me. Could this be true? I shuddered at the idea of moving to the city my parents moved to, for even though I missed them I wished to have my own chapter in life. Even though I missed them greatly, I felt as if moving to their city would certify that I myself was settling and giving up on my own life. Giving up on my own dreams and aspirations and identity. 

So no wonder I was frustrated. No wonder I was feeling blue. No wonder I was obsessing over this particular nettlesome issue in my life. 

No wonder I was feeling like a poor boy. A poor boy! I had traveled everywhere on God’s green earth I wished to travel, I had no desire to even return to any of those places (I had clearly gotten them out of my system). I was somewhat comfortable but also ultimately unhappy in the city I was currently living in, on my own. And I was determined to not move to the city my parents had moved to, even though I missed them, for I wished for my own chapter and my own life course. 

What was a poor boy to do? What was a poor boy to do, in this situation? Without his religion, without his community, and without his compass?

Grace in this moment, I told myself. And I said it again to myself. Grace in this moment. Grace in this moment, I said again for good measure. And I knew that this was important, in this moment and in many more moments to come. Many more days to come, months, years, eternities. Grace was important, not as a cheesy prescriptive tablet, but as a deep and fundamental truth. A truth uniquely and sincerely for me. For me individually. 

And I knew that even though this didn’t feel like enough, that this didn’t feel like a satisfactory answer to the great questions that were plaguing my mind, that this was still a decent answer. It wasn’t just a placeholder, it was actually an answer, even though I didn’t like the answer. Even though I didn’t like the answer, it didn’t mean that it wasn’t any less true. 

Even though I had hoped to leave the coffee shop that day with a single city in mind that I would move to, after much time and journaling and coffee consumption, I realized that this would not be the reality. This would not be the case. Was I expecting any differently? I think that ultimately I was hoping to get the name of a single city in my mind, the chosen city that I would move to and flourish in. But I also think that deep down, I knew that it wouldn’t be that simple and that any answer wouldn’t actually be enough, whether I liked the answer or not. 

If God refused to give clear answers to life’s grueling and impossibly complex questions, why was I expecting any different from a bit of journaling and soul searching?

Surely God wasn’t dead, but he was silent. Someone had taped his mouth shut and bound his hands together, and who knows how long he would be in that kind of precarious situation? For the time being, we are charged with making our own meaning and listening to any pitter patters from the Universe, no matter how trivial or aggravating they might make us feel when they do arrive. 

And so, grace. Oh, how I how the word grated on me. But oh, how timely and ultimately necessary it was. 

The path to our goals is not a straight road. It is a long and winding maze.

I left the coffee shop that day not feeling any clearer on which city to move to. If a city close to Utopian ideals did exist (which I was beginning to grow more skeptical about, moment by moment), then it would be forever elusive. Perhaps this mysterious almost-Utopian city did exist, somewhere far beyond me, and I would indeed be “happier” there in my lifetime. That was neither here nor there. For it was not tangible, it was not honest, it was not rooted in reality. For, I came to see, there would always be an almost-Utopia ahead of me, an almost-Utopia behind me, always a place I would potentially thrive more than I am perceptibly thriving here.

But that was ultimately elusive and not conducive, because it was always there and never here. 

A home not in the city, but in the body. In the soul. I had this unique and somewhat quiet revelation when I got into the driver’s seat of my vehicle. And I knew that, along with the good news of grace, this was also and equally true. 

I could be in any sort of city in the world, the whole wide world, and if I was not feeling at home in my body and in my soul, then I would surely not be feeling at home there, in that city. And conversely, if I was truly feeling at home in my body and in my soul, then absolutely any city I was living in would feel like home to me. 

And, as I sat there in the driver’s seat in the parking lot of the coffee shop having these revelations, I knew instinctively that the same was true in other areas of my life. And I was bowled over by this fact, I almost had to double down and catch my breath to recover from this. For it really applied to all the different areas of my life. 

For the rest of my life, it didn’t matter if I was in “the right city” or not. It didn’t matter if I was single, it didn’t matter if I was in a bad relationship, or if I was in an objectionably good relationship. It didn’t matter if I was in a good job, or a bad job. It didn’t matter if I was feeling lonely and blue, and it didn’t matter if I was feeling on top of the world and ready to move mountains. 

What mattered was whether or not I was honestly and completely feeling at home in my body and in my soul. And if I was offering grace every step along the way. 

I reflected on these fundamental and awe-inspiring truths when I parked my car in the apartment parking lot. And I have been reflecting on these truths every day, ever since.