Moving to where we already live

A recent post by Lindsey at A Design So Vast captured my imagination as it introduced us to her sister’s friend (and now Lindsey’s friend) Luana, who is spending a year with her husband and children living in France.

I suppose I’m something of a Francophile, as I’ve certainly fantasized my own year in Provence, working on some arcane novel that could care less if anyone would ever read it; but I’m also a bit of an Anglophile, fantasizing a year in London doing workshops on parenting or writing a screenplay.  Maybe I’m really more of an armchair traveler, loving to hear about my friends and clients’ adventures from Tibet to India, from Europe to South America while not really wishing all that much that I could go.

I found Launa’s story, and her languid and leisurely blog, both a gift and an affirmation of my own life at the moment.  Things sounded enchanting, but also difficult.  She speaks of one or another in the foursome being the wonky wheel on the market cart, and I could all too easily relate to the ruined moment, whether in the Marais or the mundane Monday meltdown at home sweet home.

So, my thought was to invite myself (and anyone who cares to join) to re-imagine life today as if you were from France or Brazil… Imagine if your home, the local market, the cars, TV and radio, the things people say, do and wear, the local flora and fauna were all exotic and utterly new and unfamiliar to you.

Imagine that you were not just visiting, but moving in for a year or more, settling into the cadence and rhythm of life as you, a local, lives it.  One of the hardest thing Luana has had to deal with is the insularity of the French—they seem to love their families, friends, hobbies, food, etc., and are less than keen to invite outsiders in.  Yet you already have friends, family, etc… but what if you could experience it with a renewed sense of wonder?

When I was studying filmmaking, one of my teachers encouraged us to realize just how much we block out as we acclimate to life—re-sensitizing us to seeing, smelling and hearing, in this case New York City.  It was both astonishing and overwhelming to actually hear the roaring screech of the subway after having learned not to be destroyed by it, or the smell of the street, but also the beauty of flowers in Washington Square Park, or the image of a mom and her daughter in matching yellow rain boots and rain coats splashing through the puddles near the big fountain.

I’ve also noticed that “close calls,” as with health scares, sometimes send us into a surreal space, a more real consciousness where so much that doesn’t matter drops away and a crystalline sort of clarity sometimes arises.  When this has happened to me, I felt extreme peace and surrender, in contrast to the gripping fear that comes when you only suspect that something may be actually wrong, doubt mingling with terror.  At least for myself, when they wheeled me into the ICU, I felt utterly free, quite the way you wish to feel on holiday but rarely do.

So, trusting that consciousness might spare us the need for big scares or big moves and instead allow us to move bravely and with eyes and ears open wide into the lives that we are already living, let’s dedicate today to mindfully exploring, savoring and experiencing the lives into which the vast collective dream has woven us—in the service of presence to lives, as they stand, shared today with each other and all our collective children.

Namaste, Bruce