A Moving Experience

Warning: Readers sensitive to sentimental, melodramatic nonsense may want to avoid this entry and wait for one with pretty pictures and videos.


Tonight our house feels a bit colder than usual and I don't think it's just winter setting in. I have cleared out the room myself, but suddenly it's emptiness strikes me as unexpected. The almost lonely atmosphere is enhanced by the fact that I know downstairs others are getting ready to leave as well.






I've never been a fan of long-term commitment. I have moved house five times in the last three years, it doesn't take me long to get tired of a job, adding a new employer to my ever expanding CV every now and then and my relationships rarely last more than a couple of months. It's easy to put my wanderlust down to just being a free spirit, but in truth I've never been able to figure out what exactly it is I'm chasing (or what's chasing me). All I know is that I've always felt there must be more out there, a life purpose to be discovered, a soul mate waiting to be found, a calling to accept rather than a job to apply for, potential to be realised, a destiny to be fulfilled. You might say I have unrealistic expectations, that I'm idealistic, a dreamer and even a little naïve. You may be right, but it's being all these things that keeps me going, keeps me young, makes me try harder, looking forward to tomorrow, keeps me alive and at the same time keeps me from ever being completely satisfied, always running, whether it's towards or away from something.


Growing up and living in a community where people lead relatively stable (one might even say boring) lives, my outlook on life has always made me feel like a bit of an outsider. It was relatively easy to leave behind that life and place that was all I knew since I can remember, because I knew that if I ever wanted to return, it will still be there, more or less unchanged. Ironically, it is considerably more difficult to leave behind my first London home, probably because I felt more at home in this messy, chaotic, temporary stop-over than in my so-called hometown. My housemates, who were strangers to me less than four months ago, may be following different paths from my own, some more sure of where they are going, some less, but at least they are all following some kind of path, going somewhere. Whether it be Amsterdam for a weekend, the Caribbean for a lifetime or the supermarket down the street, which is still halfway round the world from the hometown they started off in, they are going somewhere. And because they are going somewhere themselves, they can not be left behind by me, unlike the people back home. It also means they can not be returned to, because like me, they will not be here.


And yet, knowing all this, I am moving anyway, without any guarantee that were I might end up next will be better than here. Why? You might say it's just the rush of the unknown calling again, but it's more than that. It's because I know there is still more out there, more strangers who will become friends, more late night and early morning conversations around kitchen tables or on dirty sofas, more beers to be shared, more unplanned adventures to be had. And every time I move on I like to believe that I am getting a little closer to that illusive “something” that I am chasing, a life I may find worth settling for, a place worth staying in. But until I find that, leaving an empty house every now and then always outweighs the prospect of hanging around in one place indefinitely, wondering: “What if?”.


If following my path means meeting more temporary travelling companions than permanent neighbours, then so be it, because having to say farewell to people worth meeting still beats never meeting them in the first place.