There’s this idea that if you want to disappear you should do it somewhere small or remote. Yet it’s in the city that nobody cares about you. There’s more people than you could ever hope to know and they’re too busy with their own lives to bother with yours. It’s as communities get smaller that you see more of the same characters and because there’s fewer they’re more interesting. Conformity becomes the easiest path, especially if your difference makes others insecure.
Learning is the process by which you discover how little you actually know but the one thing I am increasingly more sure of is that everyone is different. The universe is this massive complex organic thing undergoing constant change and no two pieces are alike. Of course that means no two pieces fit perfectly together but also that there are infinite combinations. Somewhere out there is the best combination but there are a kaleidoscopic array of others, many of them very good in their own right. It’s therefore a balancing act between perfection and time to try to find it. It can make for some strange bedfellows. In any case, everyone is on their own journey and all we can do is optimize our lives for the best one possible.
Some people don’t see it as a journey. They’d rather find somewhere to put down permanent roots so they never have to move. They’d rather make themselves uninteresting and unproductive. These are the people who look at a blank canvas and see order, everything as it should be. If they’re a white spot on a white page it means they don’t have to try because nobody else is. So if someone shows up and drops a big juicy splat of thick lime green paint on the canvas it ruins everything. Their perfect canvas has been disrupted, probably permanently. No amount of scrubbing or chemicals will get it out, it’ll probably just make it even worse. How dare they. How dare they draw attention to just how blank the rest of the canvas is.
The thing about small communities is that it takes a lot more strength to be different and they often have gone out of their way to not realize we’re all different. They’ve spent their lives tuning-out the drum in their own head so they can march to the communal one, such that it is, and how dare you lack the discipline they’ve worked so hard to build. Life is a high-speed four-lane highway going through the most boring landscapes in an effort to get to the destination faster. But I’ve got news: the destination is death which means it’s the journey that counts.
I didn’t come to Brownlow to be the travel editor of Eastern Ontario’s oldest and most prestigious boundary and fencing publication. I came to visit Greg and see the new house that he bought against my advice. Truth be told despite the fact that I have travelled far more than most I don’t see myself as a traveller, rather I see myself as a nomad. I see myself as the kind of person who is free to move uphill as the waters rise, rather than frantically filling sandbags and filing insurance claims. I haven’t travelled, I’ve simply drifted where I’ve seen fit to go. And it’s only coming home to Brownlow that I’ve realized what a journey I was on.
That’s the thing about Brownlow: it’s actually a great place to be from. It’s a home port. Thanks, Brownlow, for being my home port.
-Rachael
