We’re busy getting ready for our annual trip to New Hampshire. It’s strange that on today, the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, that thanks to the international date line our Monday is going to be approximately 36 hours long. But anyway…as I prepare to go back to the United States for a few weeks, I am reminded about what it means to be away from home — what it means to willingly choose to live someplace where the rules are different and life requires a daily practice of acceptance and adaption — and I recall one of my favorite passages from one of my favorite writers.
“When a man journeys into a far country, he must be prepared to forget many of the things he has learned, and to acquire such customs as are inherent with existence in the new land; he must abandon the old ideals and the old gods, and oftentimes he must reverse the very codes by which his conduct has hitherto been shaped. To those who have the protean faculty of adaptability, the novelty of such change may even be a source of pleasure; but to those who happen to be hardened to the ruts in which they were created, the pressure of the altered environment is unbearable, and they chafe in body and spirit under the new restrictions which they do not understand. This chafing is bound to act and react, producing divers evils and leading to various misfortunes.”
– Jack London, “In a Far Country”