Leaping

 

Last week someone asked me where I wanted to go after I complete the PhD. They were asking where I would like to live, and I said I had no specific aspiration of that nature. Every place I have lived in feels like home some way, and hostile in another. Of course, not always in comparable degrees. Today I spoke to a colleague nearing the end of his PhD, who could not wait to pack up and leave to his home country. It makes me really curious, to imagine having such a sense of longing for any specific place. Later today, I will take a train to The Hague; it is one of the first places I truly felt like calling home. But even that visit would not have meant all that much to me if not for the fact that I have loved ones waiting to receive me there.

During the conversation last week, someone asked if I would be interested in going back to Kuwait. There are many reasons that does not interest me. One of them is the fact that the people that I think of when I think of Kuwait are scattered around the world now. My sense of home is not strictly geographic, and Kuwait is not the same country that I spent my childhood in. As a person who moves cities often (almost four times in the past year), I try to think about the kind of things that would motivate me to upend my life and start over. It has always been related to work or education. I am sure work will ask this of me on more occasions in the future as well. I know meaning has to be supplied by myself on occasion. One of the first philosophers I ever read was Kierkegaard. I was attracted to the idea of tweaking leaf of faith to leap to faith. Faith as not the scary gap between a secure past and a secured future, but the secure insecurity you jump into. He’s also the one who talked about how life can only be understood backwards even though it must be lived forwards. My life does appear to make a surprising amount of sense looked at backwards. Maybe there is something to be said for just taking things as they come. I feel good about my most recent leap to faith.

ddmmyy

 

There are many ways to attack the question of how one might live. A couple of years ago, a professor asked me what my plan was. Disinclined to say I was clueless, I said I was taking it one month at a time. He laughed and remarked on how ambitious it was that I did not mean to take it one day at a time. Now trying to convince myself that I am equipped to work on the doctoral method, I am not entirely sure how I should answer the question of living. I spent last Saturday mostly indoors, feelings a weird sense of guilt about not making anything of my weekend. I would not define it just in terms of productivity; there is, a particular sense of wastefulness you feel spending most of your time on the phone. If I spent an equivalent amount of time just staring into space, it might feel less wasteful.

This blog visits and revisits the idea of running away. A contradiction I have felt in that respect is how I can define running away if I do not identify myself with a place. I am running away, among other things, from someone else’s concept of belonging. How can I explain to myself the profound sense of loss I’ve been experiencing since arriving in Germany? To describe it as homesickness, while not untrue, would be reductive. The relative permanence of the move this time – that it must last at least as long as one doctoral thesis – asks of me to prepare for the kind of stability that I have not come to expect since the pandemic. For the first time since, I have a certain idea of where I should be this time next year; and that certainty comes not without its share of melancholy. If things are not so unstable and chaotic, it feels more likely that I might get found out.

There are, on the other hand, some things that I have come back to in a relatively non-deliberate attempt to feel in touch with my ‘roots’. I spent my two years in the Netherlands largely unconcerned with what was happening in football and with Manchester United. On Saturday, however, as I sat feeling a vague sense of guilt, one saving grace was the incredible sense of joy I felt from watching Gabriel send his penalty to the Hungarian sky, denying Arsenal the opportunity to win what they wanted most. Like any self-respecting football fan, I maintain that there is no sense of joy greater than watching a team you hate lose. I am, despite myself, looking forward to the World Cup hoping Portugal wins it somehow so Bruno Fernandes can scam a Balon d’Or. I don’t know if there are conclusions to be drawn from one of my longest-standing passion being reignited so. If it is a sign of me adjusting to the idea of something new and hopefully long-term, I think I welcome it. Maybe I can even look forward to taking it one year at a time.