Month: November 2024

I love living in Victoria, and when I am away I always look forward to coming back home. That’s why I have always been surprised by how returns bring with them a touch of depression. 

I have attributed this to many things, most obviously jet lag, which makes me so unlike myself for a few days.  Occasionally on leaving a ship where the crew have made it feel like a second home, I feel a bit bereft. And then there’s the need to figure out how to manage the complications of a life where I am not being taken care of hand and foot, day and night. It’s amazing how quickly I can forget where a light switch is, or where I keep the coffee filters. And now, all the things that had to wait until I got home suddenly need to be scheduled and done. 

This time, add to all that the horrific results of the election, the vestiges of a touch of food poisoning, and the brief loss of my luggage, to make this return additionally besieging. But this morning, around 4am, my typical wake up time during jet lag recovery after bedtime at 8, I put my finger on why, even with easier returns than this one, I feel so out of sorts. 

I have written here many times in the past about my decision to uproot my life and move to Canada in 2020. For any readers who didn’t know me then, in order to do this, I sold my condo, got rid of all my furniture and any possessions that wouldn’t fit in my car and drove to Victoria, sight unseen and knowing no one, trusting it would work out. I now live in a furnished heritage rental, with the world’s best owners living upstairs. I own nothing now except my clothes, jewelry (lots of earrings!) and my car. I don’t own a lamp or a throw pillow. Nada.  Zip.  To my way of seeing it, this is working out very well indeed!

But still, there is something about returning home to an environment filled with the identity of a whole life—from the knickknacks, to the art, even to the favourite dishes, that I no longer get to experience. There’s a moment where you open the door coming home and say “this is my real life.”  I don’t feel that way in part because my real life is also on ships half the year, but largely because any place I live now and for the rest of my life will never really be mine in the same way it was before I flew the coop in my car. 

 I’ve written in the past about nesters and perchers—those who need a comfy place to call home, and those who are fine wherever they are.  I am a percher to the core, but there are those moments when I remember how good it felt to  come home and see everything waiting for me, reminding me of the sum of my life. I don’t have that anymore, and I guess somewhere deep in the gut, it affects me. 

This life isn’t for everyone. For a small percentage of my head and heart, it isn’t for me either for a day or two, while I adjust to the wonderful, unencumbered reality I have made for myself. I made my choice, and I must be at home wherever I am. That soft nest to fall into must be inside me, where my fundamental identity and my most important memories live. The rest is just stuff. I’ve got the right outerwear and good winter shoes, money in the bank, and friends who are there to welcome me home to my life in Victoria, where I already feel much more settled just by writing this. 

These are the words on the tombstone of Nikos Kazantzakis, author of Zorba the Greek and many other works of fiction, poetry, and philosophy. When I was in college, I inhaled every word he wrote and even now, more than half a century later, I still remember his challenge to take on the heavy intellectual and spiritual work required to have a life of true joy and deep meaning. 

The photo below is of me laying flowers on his grave when Jim and I were there in 2008. It was the number one thing I wanted to do when I first visited Heraklion, Crete, where he is buried.  The one at the end of the post is of the epigraph on the other side of his tombstone, carved as he wrote it by hand.

I can’t say I’ve always lived up to the challenge of his words.  I haven’t always tried that hard to do so. But I still think that those few words are the best guidance I ever received. 

Kazantzakis wasn’t arguing against optimism or faith in the future, only against being wrapped up in expectations of favorable outcomes.  Likewise I think what he meant by fearing nothing isn’t that he shrugged off real threats, but that he wasn’t cluttering his mind with imagined unfavorable outcomes.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Kazantzakis was a great admirer of the Buddha, for their philosophies are both grounded in the idea that attachment is the source of suffering. We hope to get what we want and we fear we will get what we don’t want.  We want to keep what we like and get rid of what we dislike. Both are burdens, and feeling burdened is the antithesis of feeling free.

So why am I thinking about this now?  Like pretty much everyone, I am losing  my sense of well being over this election. I am emotionally exhausted with both hope and fear. 

Kazantzakis’ book The Saviors of God was at one point like the Bible for me, and one line has stuck in my memory all these years: “We shine like humble pebbles as long as they remain immersed in the sea.”  I’m sure you have picked up a wet pebble and admired the beauty of its colors, only to pull it later from your pocket to find it grey and dull. Maybe humans are like that too. Forces we cannot control bring out the best in us, revealing our true colors only when we are most caught up in them. 

This is a good time to remember that. The only answer to this terrible political situation is to accept that we are always immersed in the sum totality of what simply is—good or bad, favorable or unfavorable, scary or comforting. Our hopes and fears are tiny and ultimately meaningless battles with the future. Whatever happens, our life’s purpose is to continue to shine.