Grammar and Tones

You get born in Commoncity in Averageland. You grow up in Commoncity, you meet a girl (or boy) in and from Commoncity, get married and get children. Your children grow up in Commoncity, get married and get children in Commoncity. You die in Commoncity.

Common, average life can be so simple. There are no questions, everything is clear from the start. Life as it is now is life as it will be in the future. Your life now will be your children’s life 20 years from now. Both my wonderful wife and I have a sibling who is living this sort of life: I have a brother who lives a few streets down to where we grew up in a medium sized German city, and my wife has a “sister” who lives in a Chinese medium sized city – about the size of London – whose most notable feature is a lake. She is actually my wife’s cousin, but – thank you*, communists, for the decade long human-rights abuse of the one-child-policy – this is the closest thing you can have to a sibling in our generation in China. (*irony is a topic for another post)

A brother in Germany and a sister in China is hardly a representative sample, but my wife and I always took their lives and extrapolated them to the whole of the “typical German life” and “typical Chinese life”. We see how easy their life is, and we see how happy they are, and we see that there is never any conflict because all the major decisions in their lives are already decided before they even arose: just do the same as you always did, and as your parents did before you.

It is noteworthy that we see them about once a year. Our whole impression of their happy easy lives is based on an extrapolation of about a week a year when we see them. Not that that could possibly introduce any bias…

The common traveller’s curse

My wife has a theory. She calls it the “traveller’s curse”. The theory says that the more you travel, the less satisfied you will be in any place, because you always find things that were better in another place.

Here are some of the stops on my journey through life and through the world:

• Edinburgh, with it’s castle, and medieval alleys, was one of the most beautiful cities I have ever lived in, but the weather sucked.
• Madrid, had an amazing weather and a wonderful outdoorsy lifestyle, but the job-prospects were near zero (I was there just after the 2009 financial crisis.
• London many interesting and well-paid jobs to choose from, and it’s got some of best museums and theatres in the world. But the traffic and crowds regularly give me heart-attacks, and I can never leave the house without an umbrella.
• Beijing is surprisingly green in certain neighbourhoods which, paired with a pleasant weather 9 months a year (winters are miserable, though), made for wonderful runs and bike rides. Culturally, you do stand out a lot as a foreigner, though, which can make you feel like an outsider.

The list could go on forever.

My wife’s theory is that if we had never seen any other places, we would by default assume that where we are is the best place possible. Or, at the very least, we would never question if any other places are nicer. The question would simply not arise. It wouldn’t have any relevance. And hence we would be happy where we are, while the traveller grows increasingly frustrated wherever he goes. Blissful ignorance.

The traveller’s blessing

This is not true. It is not true for two reasons.

First, there is no blissful ignorance. People are not happy where they are because they don’t know what else is out there. People can be miserable where they are and simply not know why, or simply be unaware of the existence of a different type of life. I for one grew up reasonably happily in hometown in Germany, but I always had the feeling that something was missing. For me, this was the weather. Sunshine. Summers were great, but autumn and winters were miserable. Where I come from, even summer days are hit-and-miss in fact. I always thought that this is just how life is: sunshine is a matter of luck, and there are just so many lucky days a year. Unhappy ignorance.

When I first moved to Spain, and in November we still had reliable good weather, more so then any summer in Germany I’d ever had, I realised that sunshine is not a matter of luck. It’s a matter of location.

This is my theory of the traveller’s blessing: you can find a place that you truly love, where you feel happy, and where you feel at home. Maybe you cannot find a perfect place, maybe that doesn’t exist. But you can almost certainly find a place you like better then where you come from. And if it turns out that after all where you came from is the place you like best, you can always go back, and you will be aware of how much you have.

The double traveller’s curse

One thing that makes a place very special, is meeting someone special.

My wife and I have two different versions of where we met. The story is a topic for another post, but my wife normally tells people that we met in London, while I tell people that we met in China. For my wife, it had been the first time she had been out of China – fresh off the boat. By that time I already had moved across the world at least 5 times, and Britain was not my favourite place, but I had a good opportunity to study in an exciting PhD programme and so I thought another three or four years in London wouldn’t be too bad. We had a wonderful time there and enjoyed every minute of it, we explored all the museums, the theatres, we explored the various neighbourhoods, and I also took her to travel around Europe, South America and Asia. After our studies, the two of us, and later the three of us, and even later the four of us, moved countries multiple times – but this is a story for another post (actually, for many many other posts).

Now here is where the traveller’s blessing turns into the double traveller’s curse. The traveller doesn’t exist in isolation. Both travellers have seen the world, and both have seen that life in some places can be better than in others. Both feel at home in some place. This might be their original home, the other’s home, or a third country. But it is rare that both people find the same place to be the very top of their list.

Some places feel very special, feel like home. But a special person will always be more special than any place could ever be. The double traveller’s curse is that both of you have seen the world, and both of you know that there is this one special place that most feels like home to you. But both of you also know that you will never be able to settle in the place that special place, because the special person always takes priority over the special place. So you settle in the second or third best place and keep dreaming. Is this a curse? Or is this the beauty of compromise?