Home

We have been here for 3 weeks in Sydney, but it feels longer. Maybe because we have changed living places 3 times, but SA feels a lifetime away. When I think back on the year and months before our departure, we had so much optimism for life on this side of the pond. I guess we were idealistic and that needs to rightly be brought into line with reality, but there is an old saying: 'Where you go, you will be.' I have been working long hours to try and get a handle on things and a grasp of this market. Everything I do seems to take forever and I long for the comfort of the familiar, because the disorientation one normally feels in leaving a job is compuounded and magnified by emigration. You really start from scratch with no network of people to call on and no safety net in a sense.

I guess that I long for a sense of routine because it creates a context within which and from which one can happily explore. It is not the same as being on holiday where everything new is exciting and wonderful and you can just appreciate it for what it is. The sensory overload here is tiring as you have to begin to find patterns to things - consciously endeavour to make roads and goods familiar so that it becomes a known and given to counter the seemingly insiduous ever -new. Certainly, as much as I love travelling the world and seeing new things and am awed by it -as you may have seen in my earlier blogs, at the end of the trip there is a feeling of belonging and affection and even release when someone says: 'It's time to head home.' Just the word: 'home' conjures images of a fireplace, good food and wine, family and friends laughing and teasing and even just sitting talking nonsense together, a messy mix of random memories! I do know that I am deeply blessed that the word evokes such memories and images as many people have never known that. It is not an easy thing to build a home and I think that more and more I have come to appreciate that like happiness, it is almost always a by-product of a lot of other things. As corny as it sounds, I really look forward to the day when this is not just our permanent chosen place of residence, but truly our home.