As I write this I’m sitting in the airport lounge in Sydney waiting for a flight heading for Seattle. It has been an amazing year and with my return I am bringing to a close a chapter of my life that defies simple description or easy summarization. A lot of stuff has shifted (transformed) for me and, while I did not go everywhere or do everything that I had originally planned, I did get what I got and what I got has been profound.
I titled this post with a cliché that I think is rather appropriate. I know that clichés can be tricky things to use as a writer, but this one jumped up at me a few weeks back. It was a real ‘light bulb’ moment and it is a transformation I really want to share.
The way I always understood “wherever you go, there you are” in the past was with the emphasis on the part of you being at some place; the word there being the key to the meaning. That is: you are there. “There” becomes a tangible thing and functions to divide you from it and, in so doing, you are created as something distinct and separate. Your you then becomes something that is created, not by you, but by it.
In the end, place is just place and exists only as it does. What is a mountain to a mountain? What is a sunset to the sun? Mountains are only beautiful because we use language (and agreement) to create them as such.
It is through our language that we create things as we want them to be. So what would life be like if I instead choose that place is not what creates me, but that I create place? And that, wherever I go, there I am.
So if place is just place, what then might be important about different places? The obvious answer might be the common denominator of “I” being what’s different. This is certainly true.
However, what I found truly profound and what really flipped my switch was not that I could create being in some locality, but that there is created by community and the relationships with other people to be found in those different places. What becomes important then is not the I but the we.
So if the physicality of place no longer matters and that I know myself to be someone who can self generate identity, what then is possible?
With this question in mind as I begin this journey to a place called “home,” where exists a community of family and friends, what is possible in the that place?
What is possible is whatever we choose to create.
Wherever you go, there you are.
