OCEANS AWAY

Another new place

Filed under At Home

I like to think that it all started with Kentucky, and now nothing will ever be impossible to overcome. Sometimes, I am deeply aware of how inexperienced and unworldly I actually am and that saying otherwise makes me sound nothing but unjustifiably smug. Sometimes, I think that maybe I have already earned some small claim to legitimate routine and experience when I talk about travel and the joys and pitfalls of starting over in a new place.

With Kentucky, I just jumped. Barely 16 years old, off I went to live in a country I had never seen with people I had never met, for a whole year, 7000 kilometers from the only place I’d known thus far. After that, the decision to study in the Netherlands came easy. Adjusting to life in a different language and in a place I had never been to was sometimes challenging but, in a way, because I had done it before, on a grander scale, came effortlessly. My semester in Sweden, similarly, was just another new place, another new language, another new group of people from all over the world; crisis management, culture shock, the expected and the unexpected – somewhere along the way, you learn to deal. You learn to love everything about it.

In retrospect, Kentucky seems like such a crazy thing to do. I suppose, it’s the kind of thing you only have the guts and the naivete to decide to do when you’re a teenager. And hundreds of thousands of them do, every year, so I’m in no way different from a great bulk of other young people out there. But it still feels like Kentucky prepared me for anything that has and might come after. In my own little life – irrespective of what it means to truly be a seasoned traveler or woman of the world, or how many others are just like me – it has enabled me to go wherever I want to go and be okay. I don’t know that there could be a greater gift than that.

I moved to Cologne yesterday. It’s new, it’s different. It’s another new place that, while certainly challenging, will be an easy hurdle after Kentucky and Sweden and Maastricht. There is such relief and certitude and a great sense of calm in knowing that I’ve done this before. That the very start of it is always rocky but that I’m capable of getting past that, and indeed that I always will get past that. — It would be unreasonable to suggest that there will never be a new place that’ll throw me, just as it would be ridiculous to make predictions about anything concerning travel or where I might end up next. But for this move to Cologne, this big noisy city that overwhelms me every time I step out onto its busy boulevards and get lost on its crowded subways, I now see that my experience is vast enough to slowly and safely guide me through. It should be: after all, I moved back to where people speak my native language and supermarkets look the same as they did growing up.

It all started with Kentucky, that much I know. But anything I can really say about Cologne and whatever might come next year is that in spite of the stress and the worries and the doubts and the goodbyes, every arrival in a new place is so valuable. It makes you understand the world a little bit better, shapes who you are, and opens your mind to everything else that is out there.

The more places I see and experience, the bigger I realize the world to be. The more of it I become aware of, the more I realize how relatively little I know of it; how many places I have still to go; how much more there is to learn. Maybe that’s enlightenment enough: to know that there is no final resting place of the mind, no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom, such as it is, for me, means realizing how small I am and unwise and how far I have yet to go.
– Anthony Bourdain