For a week or two every autumn, like right now, the tree outside our living room turns the color of a blood orange. I have been leaving my blinds fully open as usual, for as long as there’s daylight, the reflecting color from the tree bathing the walls a soft grey-pink. In due time, the leaves will start falling off, ushering in the winter.
Recently I read a note about a guy who dropped every security of his life — the shackles of employment, a mortgage, a retirement plan — and with a one-way ticket to Asia, started travelling unhindered in order to be happy. Everyone has, in one form or another, heard of similar stories, all the way from the awkward early years of social media. It’s a modern-day fantasy so oft-repeated by now that it’s almost beginning to lack in originality, yet still has the power to seize anyone with envy. I still think about doing it, too, from time to time; just in varying intensities and frequencies. In its most extreme it usually involves selling off the house and the car, quitting the day job, and living in a rented house in rural Japan for a year. It could also be going on that backpacking trip through the European railway system that I never got to do when I was younger, or the cross-country drive reminiscent of Elizabethtown. I think about what this entails, how much pluck it requires. But I also think about the tree.
Or the summers, when the lingering heat at dusk makes our bedroom smell something nostalgic that couldn’t be bottled. I open the door and it’s there and I would inhale and fill my lungs with it. Or when it’s raining, and the raindrops hit the windowpanes just right that there’s a soft pitter-patter, and there’s a perfectly good reading armchair in a perfectly navy-blue color with a perfectly deep seat, right next to the window and the wall shelf full of books. Or the ability to respond with an unconditional yes when a friend asks for a little financial help, after hurricanes and floods and parental deaths, of being halfway to orphanhood. The stability in order to provide that yes and not have to think about it being returned.
I consider the “everything” that would need to be dropped and it apparently includes these. My little monotonies, my commonplace familiars. The proverbial grass is always greener on the hypothetical other side, and in this privileged society it’s criminally easy to find the current state of our lives to be “too bland” to be endured. In my family’s old apartment in Goleta, I had a large map of the United States tacked on the wall across the bed, each state a colorful piece of a puzzle garnished with interstate highways in thick black lines, mountain ranges of undulating italics, rivers as blue snakes, capital cities marked in bull’s-eyes. I stared at that map a lot, tracing down all the long-haul road trips I was going to make “once I grew up,” making imaginary packing lists and itineraries, figuring out how to live on the road. Even then — and perhaps most especially then — there was a lot of impatience to get going, to be elsewhere, that in restrospect, I didn’t feel at all that present.
I am much older. I no longer even have the map. I have not seen the whole world; in fact, a mere microcosm against the grand scheme, but I like to believe that I’ve seen plenty enough. A holiday coming to an end, even a short one, will always have that Sunday-evening feeling that’s laced with melancholia and a little bit of dread, but I also look forward to coming home, every time. I like to exit the freeway on our usual off-ramp, to see the house waiting. “Okaeri,” it seems to say. We burst in: “Tadaima!” Just now. Just now, I am home to the faint scent of our usual detergent on clean bedsheets, the dried carnations on the kitchen counter, the otaku knick-knacks on the shelves. I feel relief as I escape the collapsed confinements of a luggage. I don’t know if it’s age, or simply exhaustion from having already seen the fast-track of perpetual travel, to not find full satisfaction in being away anymore. Contrary to what the explorers advise, I cling ever more to what is comfortable and safe.
Of course the envy will still pay a random visit sometimes, the seduction of the road not taken. I envy the guy frolicking around in Asia as much as I envied that couple who went on that infamous honeymoon that spanned 16 countries1, and will continue to do so for every Westerner who buys an abandoned kominka and is now farming in the depths of the Japanese countryside. There might not be a cure for this envy, and I’m almost certain that despite it all I will reconsider things again upon hearing the next story of fleeing one’s well-made nest, regardless of originality or reason or necessity. Ralph Waldo Emerson puts things in perspective; in Self-Reliance he corrects that skewed, rose-tinted outlook that I/people sometimes have towards travel, the delusion that it can cure home-based woes.
Traveling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness.
I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.
For now, for tadaima, my bank account sleeps easy. The browser tabs searching for one-way flights and extended-stay visas are closed. Someday, I might just jump in with both feet, without a lifesaver. I might just file a sabbatical. But not now. In these momentary and finicky interims of contentment, I’m choosing this explosive, burst-blood-red of a tree.
2024, 2025
- (Noted on 5/2025) In correcting this broken link, I can’t believe that I can now only access that blog via the Wayback Machine. Good lord. ↩︎
TINY WORRIES 