The Existentialism of Place

It's becoming my Friday night tradition to get lost. After reading, eating, and (now) net surfing, I set out to get some exercise and see what's around. I usually walk for about 2 hours, enough time to cover good ground, and it really helps to piece together my concept of the surrounding area. Living near 2 major universities means I can usually find signs pointing me back, and I always take my T-Money card, so if I ever get truly off track, I can just find a subway station and have myself delivered back to familiar ground. Tonight I discovered tombs not very far away, found a park I've been eyeing on the map for a while, and located a Mexican restaurant within easy walking distance. Not bad.

Walking also gives my mind a chance to cut loose and let my impressions roll around and settle. I was pondering the nature of happiness tonight...what are the essential ingredients, levels of intensity, etc. I like my apartment. I'm never at a loss for things to do at home (my Seoul home), and my time here always goes quickly. I don't, however, feel joy at being here, as I do in my Rochester home. That apartment is more comfortable and provides more comfort (2 different things); the aesthetics are more soul-nourishing. It is a place where friends and family come and go. The cats live there, and their personalities infuse life into the place; interactions with them punctuate my time there and give rise to little explosions of delight that are addictive. So is it love that gives rise to happiness? I am not unhappy in Seoul, but delight seems a precious commodity. Is a completed circuit of affection a missing link? I looked at the married couples at Orientation, and realized how different this experience would be with an emotional home port at hand. For that matter, how different is the experience of Life when you have an emotional home port?

Familiarity, too, gives a sense of well-being. My interest in Seoul, and Korea, at this point is completely intellectual. Navigating a new culture is interesting, and I enjoy seeing different things and spotting differences. The waffles they sell on the subway platform are wonderful, and I think about them all week. But when I'm deciding what to do on a weekend, it's with a bit of a checklist approach. At home, the things I do in my free time, when not the result of someone else's suggestion, are often due to a sudden yearning to be in a particular place. Durand Beach, for instance, is not that empirically special, but is a place I frequently feel drawn to. I love the Lake and the sky and walking on the sand, but a visit there is also a continuation of all the visits in the past. It is where I swam as a kid, where I liked to drive when my license was new, where I watched the leaves change and the sun rise on my way to various jobs, where I went to polka at Oktoberfest, where I took my car to turn 200,000 miles and again for 300,000, where I walk with my Dad and without, where I've skated and frozen and gotten stuck in the snow with Mark, and all these mundane, magical moments that are cumulative and make simply being in that space a joyous occasion.

C.S. Lewis saw joy as proof of the existence of God. While this seems a potentially specious connection, as someone with beliefs tending towards animism, I think of the exhilaration of the aurora borealis or watching 30' waves crash on a beach or a humpback whale doing laps under the Zodiac I'm sitting in, and I have to concede that he may have a point. Maybe god is not so much in the details as in the semantics...we term religious those experiences that put our fingers on the pulse of the universe; for many people that takes the form of a personified God, for others it is simply a sense, an intuition, or something else entirely. And maybe that's why love and memories and cherished places feel so good--they connect us to what is eternal and give us confidence that we have a place in it all. So that is why moving away is so jarring...it's like pulling the plug on your umbilical cord to the Universe.

I'm sure things will soon be different. I was surprised by the pull Denver exerted on me, and I frequently think of London with affection, and I was far more bereft when I initially found myself in those places. I have no doubt that I will enjoy my time in Korea--hell, I already am--and will feel nostalgia for it when I'm home again. The people who've stayed for several years probably felt exactly as I do now. In fact, they probably felt worse because I've been lucky enough to have friends--and knowledgeable ones at that--right away.

I'll be so curious to hear myself in 48 weeks.