Certainty or Freedom?

Assumptions or Responsibility?

I love it in Vietnam. It may be the Yamaha Ferrari that I purchased, with Louis Vuitton seat coverings to match; it may be the mountain views and ocean walks; it may be a combination of a whole bunch of things, but I love it here.

First things first: the Ferrari. Sometimes bragging is good for the soul.

Since arriving, the dominant feelings have been love, wonder, and gratitude. Everything is new again, as the eyes that view my reality learn to decipher an entirely new language. I have met genuine people who are carving a similar path through life. There are a great many things I don’t understand that cause genuine wonder. Permeating everything is a sense of ‘well would you just look at how amazingly things can turn out sometimes’! It’s not always like this when I land in a new place, so I’ve been reflecting on the motivating forces behind travel.

Often, the driving force behind travel is to find The Place that makes you feel At Home. There is a tendency to mistake the feeling of At Home as 100% dependent on The Place. But that sense of At Home is more about the feelings within you that determine whether or not you’re in a place, or you’re in The Place.

When you feel At Home, The Place becomes background noise because you feel At Home within yourself—you see this feeling of At Home is purely internal. The Place becomes an external reflection of your internal state, ‘At Home’ is reflected all around you, and the place loses its need for capitalisation.

But the second something threatens your internal feeling At Home, it’s easy to focus on The Place, newly recapitalised under the weight of blame. Something is wrong with The Place. The environment isn’t supportive of me. I don’t like the weather in The Place. Whatever.

But, when At Home and The Place line up it’s really lovely. I’ve felt At Home in Da Nang despite it being simultaneously totally foreign. The environment is, however, playing a background harmony over the beautiful internal melody of At Homeness. Maybe it’s the Ferrari giving me confidence (and an unreasonable case of what the kids these days refer to as ‘big dick energy’), but I feel no pressure to be anything other than myself. Trying to create something ‘because…’ is dead. It felt dead for a while, but it had persisted subtly, especially within relationships.

(Semi-unrelated: I’ve found that my happy place for all things writing is still Black and Death Metal. To capture the feeling I had while talking about the big dick energy of the Ferrari, I highly recommend reading this piece while In The Absence Ov Light by Behemoth is playing in your ears)

Relationships were forged ‘because of’ some reason (avoiding loneliness?); work projects were designed ‘because of’ another (avoiding boredom?); there was an extrinsic motivator driving these relationships. And all of these ‘because of’ reasons had been built around this need to feel At Home. Without friends, without work, without purpose and support, how can you feel At Home in Any Place?

I recall being hit by the wave of feeling Not At Home in Melbourne (where I was born and raised) around 2015. I had friends, work, purpose, and support, but felt distinctly Not At Home. I determined that Melbourne was not The Place where I felt At Home. But I had no idea where that place was, so I went looking.

Every different place would bring about a number of tiny revolutions (shoutout

Sara Campbell

for the beautiful term) and occasionally gigantic ones. These changed how I viewed and interacted with the world. I would step closer towards the sense of At Homeness internally, until The Place was no longer where I felt most At Home, so I’d move again.

But the process of feeling At Home is occurring so quickly now, and I am arriving into new places in the shoes of the person I am most At Home within—myself. This same person was with me in my most recent Melbourne Experiment, but The Place definitely plays a role, and Melbourne still ain’t The Place.

The critical ingredients in whipping up The Place, for me, seem to be about balancing assumptions, certainty, freedom, and responsibility.

In Da Nang, it takes me and my Ferrari ten minutes along the beach before I arrive in the city. I am on high alert as I’m slammed by cross-winds, and people approach me on scooters and bicycles on the wrong side of the road. Meanwhile, pedestrians cross as they will, and I am overtaken by scooters with cages on the back, filled with live chooks, crowned by two large ducks who have simply been tied to the top of the cage. Not to mention the sharks of the traffic world (buses, trucks, four-wheel drives, cars, and anything larger than a scooter) rolling through intersections and turning in front of me as they see fit. No room for assumptions beyond the three seconds beyond my Ferrari, and no certainty either.

I am so intensely aware, awake, and alive. The elements are present constantly. There is moisture in the air all the time, with a breeze of some strength carrying it into your hair and clothes. You get home and you’re wet, but it didn’t rain a drop. Unless it did, in which case all that aliveness I mentioned is ratcheted up by a factor of 10, and you’re surprised when you come home wet because you were so concentrated on getting home safely that you don’t notice becoming wet at all. And if there’s no moisture in the air, it’s because the sun is intent on frying every uncovered patch of your skin.

I have traded assumptions and certainty for freedom and responsibility. This is what I need to feel At Home, to feel like I have some responsibility for my survival, beyond earning money to pay for rent and food. I am constantly aware that my life is in my own hands, and it adds purpose to things. ‘Pay attention Nick, inattention might kill you’ is a great motivator.

There’s a stark difference between the nervous system responding to actual threats to your existence, when compared to the nervous system experiencing near-constant stress of an existential nature. Stress of the former kind is natural, it spikes your cortisol and you react to shit as though it’s life or death—because it is—before it chills out and you feel relaxed. But the existentially stressed nervous system doesn’t know how to relax because it’s constantly under subtle tension (career, society, technology, politics, assumptions/certainty, take your pick).

But when I consider whether I should throttle into a pinchpoint-like gap between two cars at a roundabout, which might be the smoothest path to my exit only to realise at the last instant that it is a death trap that forces me to hit the brakes, before going around the roundabout once more to exit safely, none of that stress exists. There are no assumptions and no certainty; there is no career, no society, no technology, no politics; there’s only the freedom and responsibility to navigate the many different ways my life might end, and find the one way it won’t. And when you find that way, it’s so rewarding!

This is the grand take-home on the topic: it is your responsibility to feel At Home in what you do, and your feeling of responsibility is often the biggest contributor to feeling At Home. In countries where I feel that I could walk through life with my eyes closed (Australia, Germany) I feel there’s no need to take responsibility, and that absence leads to purposeless and an existentially stressed nervous system. But when crossing the road might kill me, everything is my responsibility.

Because what else is freedom, if not total responsibility?

Happy birthday!