Nomad

I was always a wanderer. 

Growing up in a big family, and until all my siblings moved out, I had no room of my own. I slept in the dining room, the office, the balcony, and nearly every room bar the kitchen and bathrooms. Moving to college meant more changes, moving from dorm to dorm, from university back home, and back to campus. 

In this life of constant change, I longed for stability, settling down in my own place. I regarded all those moves as temporary. My life was on hold, pending a list of successive goals: finish college, get a job, get married, and and buy house.

In my search for stability, as I checked those boxes, I was really going against my nature, building a figment of stability in a world that never ceased to change. 

The moves continued, in the form of travel. In each of several recent years, I made more than a dozen trips, one for each month: some only for a day, and some a week or longer. Spending so many weekends away from home, I longed to settle down, gravitating towards an unhappy stability, and accepting of bad situations. My distaste for change thus led me to years of an unhappy marriage and an unsatisfying job.

After my most recent move, prompted by my divorce, I got to accept that this nomadic life is in my nature. Wherever I am, even on the move, I am alive. If I were to put everything on hold until stability is achieved, I am throwing my life away. Today I befriended change again.


[adapted from a post written on the day I moved out of my married house, for good]

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