In transit

I am on a dark plane somewhere over the Pacific. This plane, unlike every other plane I’ve flown on in the last 18 months, is not full. I have had this little row of two seats—the last two seats on the plane—to myself to attempt to fight the armrests and stretch a little. I have slept much more than I’d have guessed I’d sleep, and I’m still noticing that it’s 2 am in New Zealand, which might mean it’s a little early to wake up! But here, in the dark silence of my back row, it seems like a wonderful time to reflect upon the bright busy-ness of my trip.

I had believed that this trip wouldn’t change me at all, mostly because I was doing things that I have done before and going to places I have been before. What is the change in that? What I have discovered, though, is that I am different after my time in New Zealand, and so those places and relationships and things are different too. One of the differences has been my relationship to Cambridge and to Boston. There are ways that those places feel more like home to me than any place else I’ve ever been. Joan’s apartment—where I have stayed each time I visited Boston for the past six years—is the only address in the US I know by heart anymore. That feels like home for me.

And Cambridge—neighborhoods ugly and beautiful, urban and more suburban, teeming with people from every culture and nationality—has felt like the place where my heart beats most in rhythm. At dinner with a friend, I watched the sunset from his apartment windows and then watched the lightening sizzle through the clouds while we talked about leadership development and personal practice and complexity. These aren’t conversations I get a lot of in places outside of Cambridge, and I felt my toes pull down into the ground and try to take root in this city where I have felt most fully myself in my life.

Ah, but Cambridge has a reputation for being overly-heady and precious. It is the most liberal of the liberal intellegencia, and it irritates people in it’s self-absorption. I have known this reputation a long time, and have disagreed with it. Or at least I used to. In the days that I was in Cambridge, as I found my toes trying to root, I also found myself repelled by that preciousness, that grandness. As I would watch myself in conversations with groups over dinner, or pass through conversations with other people, I felt pushed away as well as welcomed; felt a deep longing to be in the center of it and also a frustration with the very partial view from that center. And there was the discovery: my heart does not beat fully in synch in Cambridge anymore. I am no longer fully of that place. I used to think that of all the places in the world, I belonged most there. Now I am beginning to doubt that there is anyplace in the world I will feel that way about.

This doubting has a kind of delightful freedom in it, and a kind of sadness. I have packed them both in my carry on luggage and stowed it under the seat in front of me. I’m going home first to Auckland, to give a speech for a large group of teachers and then a workshop for a smaller group of administrators. I will be instantly aware that these are not my people either. They will be harder to warm up than groups in the US (the Harvard class was singularly delightful and easy to warm up and the SOI workshop was a kind of intellectual and spiritual lovefest) and they will know instantly that I am from Away. Perhaps we will be together long enough for them to realise that I share some fundamental sensibilities with them; perhaps I will carry that knowledge and they will not. I will seem very much not at home.

But then, when I get off the plane in Wellington on Sunday afternoon and see my family at the gate, there is no doubt I will feel myself at home. When I walk into my new house and roll on the floor with my dog and see my dear friends here, my heart will beat in time with my life here. And when I walk on the beach with family and friends, and come back to my lovely new kitchen, it’s hard to imagine that my toes won’t reach down, rooted in this place, which is also not fully me.

While I was waiting for the airplane in Boston, Mom called to tell me that The Fax had come. I thought I might begin this trip with the news that I had finally made the last step in the tenure track; instead, I ended it that way. Now I have a thing I used to long for as a child who moved each year to a new city; a solid and stable base: “an appointment without term.” I can teach at George Mason for the rest of my life. How does this play unfold next? I don’t know, the ink is still so wet on these pages that it’s smudging in unexpected ways.