Friday, January 14, 2011

To Be or Not to Be (aka Should I Stay or Should I Go?)




If you're like me, you find people and places have taken pieces of your heart. Or more accurately, you leave pieces of your heart with people and places. This is how the heart makes room, stays connected, expands.

As I come to close a long stay in the home of my heart (one of the homes, the one with the deepest roots) I find myself in that familiar dilemma. Torn between two lovers of rootedness and wanderlust I ask the age old question in the rock & roll question in the style of The Clash: should I stay or should I go?

Perhaps this is not the question to ask. Perhaps it isn't a geographical question but an existentialist one: To be or Not to Be. In America, this poses mutually exclusive options. One must pick a side. But where I am from, both options can be true simultaneously. Both possibilities can be had in one go. To be is not to be, and the question is the answer,

And so I sit, just having spent my sister's 30somethingth birthday with her for the first time in over a decade and beginning to pack for my trip back to the States. Not staying, not going. Just being. And living. And not being gloomy. And being happy. And being grateful. And looking forward. And looking back with a happy, growing heart.

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