This quote represents something I often wrestle with, and which I expect to for years to come, if not forever. It goes hand-in-hand with some of my favourite quotes, including “I want to feel my life while I’m in it,” and “the grass is greener where you water it”. It also reminds me of a saying that for me at once feels like both a threat and a comfort: “wherever you go, there you are”.
I apply this idea for little everyday moments, when I try to stay present and acknowledge my happiness as its happening. I also less successfully apply it in the big picture, when I sometimes struggle to be where I am and also be okay with where I am. Living in a foreign country makes it easy to wish you were home, or travelling, or somewhere other than where you are when things get hard or tedious. My closest friend here left yesterday and it’s hard not to have the knee-jerk reaction of wishing I was going home too.
But I’ve been realizing that being a good person and a whole, evolved one is all about having those knee-jerk reactions and then gently course-correcting. I can’t stop myself from having thoughts I wish I didn’t or feelings I wish I wouldn’t, and no amount of guilt or positive thinking or beating myself up is going to change that. The best I can do is see it, feel it, and then give myself gentle reminders to shift my thinking and my actions.
This saying is one of those reminders to me. Yes, part of me – the small part – might occasionally wish I was going home. The bigger part knows how much this experience does already and will one day mean to me. The bigger part knows that this is what I want and it’s what is best for me, and it knows what an incredible shame it would be to wish this time away so I could just get to the end. It knows that most of the time, I really love my life here. The bigger part of me also knows that if I don’t find ways to handle this feeling of always wanting to be somewhere else, somewhere “better”, then it won’t magically go away when I finally “arrive” at the place I think I should be. I never want to live in the someday or the one day. I want to live right where I am.
I’ve made this quote into a wallpaper for my computer for the month as one of those gentle reminders to stay with it. If this idea resonates with you too, you can download your own copy of the wallpaper at the link below.
You can also find all my previous wallpaper downloads here.
