I don’t know why, but this thought has been ticking in my head like a time bomb. I have to pen it down to make space for more important studies in the coming weeks. Anyway, I;ve been thinking, what is home to a global person, who travels to and fro, negotiating time differences, someone like an air stewardess, or a public speaker, or a humanitarian worker? What is the concept of home to these geographically derogatory person? Constant trips?
Here’s something interesting, or what I think could be interesting, at least in my head. That these people do not move from places, but that the places move to them. Say for example, in your constant trips from Singapore to Hong Kong, Norway, Paris, Prague, Tokyo, etc etc… You stay in the same hotel, eat the same egg mayo sandwhich and if you like (and really what most people do) have chinese food in Prague and french food in Tokyo, you use the same kind of technology, your iPhone, your mac… and discuss the same global problems with the same kind of people. You have a ‘home experience’ of a kind, in which all of the above are familiar to you. You understand others without further explanation. You form functional relationships whic are not uncanny to you, but more of a reality. These foreign places are not foreign places, but they are also not your home. You fail to anchor a thought/a commodity/a person when some says “Where is home?”
So what I’m trying to say is that people who travel every other day have not really travelled. They have stayed put in the vaccuum that is between a ‘home’, and a ‘foreign’ land. It is as if those places moved to them instead, and what they do remains the same, the same old routine. That’s why, you are always in the present, carrying a particular time, as oppose to a particular culture of a particular place. You only move with with present time, you live temporally in abstracted place of nowhere and everywhere and therefore, your experiences are also abstract.
What do you guys think? D’accord, ou n’as d’accord pas?
WAH! never thought of it that way! that we/they are in a vacuum of home and away. but it is too generalised to say everything is abstract..