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.