Nostalgia

I'd like my blog to be characterized by restraint, but this is also my personal journal.

When I have nostalgia, it is almost always not for what was, but more for what might have been--but wasn't--for being just out of reach.

One recurring daydream of mine as a teen-ager involved working or going to university in Europe and the altogether different life I thought I would have there. Perhaps this is an eye-roller for most people (not for anything bad about Europe, but for being too romantic). But still, it was a dream of mine, and I don't look down on it from the vantage point of early middle age. I like myself for having wanted this. 

In my daydream, I would somehow have a neater, tidier and more fashionable style of clothing. I would learn to comport myself in a less clumsy way. I would speak another language well. I would go to discotheques. I would have a boyfriend there. We'd find ourselves in alleys in Marseilles, the Gare de Lyon, a moonlit section of pastoral countryside, a Milan or Berlin nightclub. All those famous places, all those famous atmospheres. We would have sweet secrets we'd never share till death. I'd eat cheese that wasn't cheddar.

Later, I did go to France, and I did study there, at least for four months. I wasn't able to have those other experiences, however, for a reason that I don't wish to share even on this blog. 

You're entitled to spend your life in a location. That's it, and no more. You aren't entitled to spend your life in the location of your choice, or the location you find most desirable. Perhaps more importantly, there-versus-here is to some degree often a false choice created by misapprehension, as romanticism usually can't withstand familiarity. Therefore, life is what you make it, wherever you are, which means that in order to have a happy life--to tweak the words of Marcus Aurelius--you must love the location to which fate binds you, but do so with all your heart.