Living in the negative space

 

Tuesday I dropped everything, strapped on my helmet and pantleg elastic, and rode off to the FS training centre to take the Transitioning Home from Life Abroad course. I got lost twice. First I rode up one steep Gatineau hill, only to realize I must re-descend, then l did it again with another.

I hardly noticed the forest alongside but I knew it was there. I'd run its trails during a year of German training eight years ago. l arrived almost but not late to the course.

The pre-course readings included the usual graphs about the emotional stages of transition. It's okay, then bad, then slowly better. You'll just feel wrong. Then less wrong. No one cares how you've changed. Remember that they've changed, too. All this in much more eloquent words, all mostly accurate.

They included an article called That Discomfort You're Feeling is Grief. It was the first sign that someone understood, that all this could be understood. I read all the articles out loud to my husband.

An FS has to do many very different things, often on short notice and without preparation time or training, and must do them more or less competently. They must have this flexibility, self discipline, desire to learn, judgement and ethics, all without subsuming to the internal stresses these flexions create internally.

And one must do this for decades, through children, spouses, sickness, debt, neglected friends and family - all the many things that characterize normal life, while moving from country to country.

It’s very thrilling to satisfy one’s curiosity and fernweh, as the Germans put it - farsickness, as opposed to homesickness. It’s also exhausting. No wonder so many of us end up eccentric or divas, on the boards of one think tank or another, or alone. That’s another way of saying, there’s no way if knowing where this leads.

Another way of describing a life of change and discovery is to notice that new beginnings happen when things end. The things left behind can't be brought along, or not in their fully present way. They leave absences, holes so ragged they can't be stitched up in words. Or I can't.

My phone gives me the option of a typeface that is new to me, called Bahnschrift. This is German and it means, trainwriting. Writing of the way.