Returning

When you’ve been ‘away’ what does it mean to come ‘back’?

There’s a curious thing that happens when you’ve been on a long trip. When you come back, everything seems the same, as if you blinked and didn’t actually leave. Life at ‘home’ carried on blithely without you. Other people’s routines stayed the same. The clock ticked on.

Except you are different. Perspectives have been shifted, decisions made, changes already put into play. It can be a disconnect.

After all, life is mostly ordinary moments not epic trips to Japan. The concierge at the apartment building we stayed at is still doing her job. The kids will be back walking themselves to school. The freshly-made onigiri is being stacked on the shelves in the local convenience store. Same here in the UK. The ordinary rhythms of life continue.

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But when we do big trips it’s like we break through the matrix. We voluntarily step off the conveyor belt of the everyday and disrupt the algorithms for a moment enabling that different perspective. We’re permitted a glimpse of an alternative way of being. What a different kind of ordinary could be like. And if we don’t do this deliberately… I find that life tends to throw calamity in our path to force us to do it.