Before leaving for study abroad this semester, a friend of mine and I were sitting around a fire at her farm in Barboursville, Va., reflecting on the past month and looking forward to our upcoming time away. She had just started seeing someone and things were going excitingly well. They had arranged to visit each other over break — for him to visit her family in Georgia, for her to visit his in Ohio. To move, basically, as close to dating as possible without actually calling it that.
The hesitation to label this something that was, to nearly any outsider, very much a relationship stemmed from the fact my friend would be abroad all spring. “It’s too strange to look so far into the future when we’ve only known each other for four weeks,” she explained. She further went on to tell me that while they hoped to pick things up right where they had left off once both were back in the fall, they didn’t feel comfortable banking on there being a definite expectation of that happening.
“It gets you thinking, though,” the friend continued. “Because, okay, let’s say when I’m back, we do return to how things were before. Great. But then, we graduate. And I want to move somewhere, I want to be abroad again. And he doesn’t want that, so where does that leave us?”
She wasn’t trying to plan out the next year of her life so exactly. She was instead making a larger point about movement and how understandably difficult it is to picture yourself settling down when you’re hoping to spend the next several years of your life in an unpredictable manner — when you intend on an abundance of picking-up-and-going in your foreseeable future.
Fittingly, a similar conversation came up again with another friend relatively recently while we were sailing from Cape Town to Accra.
“What I’ve realized since being here,” she said in reference to our past semester abroad, “is that you can find people anywhere. Good people — people I’m attracted to, people I want to be friends with, just plain, good people — are everywhere. No matter where you are, you can find genuine people, and with them, you can make any place a good one.”
The key to this, we agreed, was making the conscious decision to seek out good people and put yourself out there and actively engage in the world around you.
We further agreed that this realization — one we saw firsthand this semester, after spending the first few weeks on the ship jumping from person to person before finally settling on a circle of people we are now heartbroken to be separating from so scarily soon — made us less afraid of our future plans for movement, and more excited about and more confident in our upcoming unsettledness.
This all is a bit of a double-edged sword. Indeed, it’s heartwarming to have witnessed and to believe you can make any place a home and meet lifelong friends anywhere you find yourself. But it is also heartbreaking, harsh — in a life of constant movement and migration, your time spent in each place and with each set of people is inevitably short. For every hello and every getting-to-know you, there is also a tough-to-face goodbye, a cloudy overhang of questioning and wondering, “When will we see each other again?”
I won’t pretend to have the answer. While I’m glad to have up-and-moved a fair number of times in my admittedly young life, my life is still that — short and young. But my guess is that the answer is keeping people — the shadow and personality of them, the lessons taught by them, the memories and stories of time spent with them — inside your head and close to your heart.
A favorite writer of mine, Joan Didion, has an essay entitled “On Keeping a Notebook,” in which she says, “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be.” Otherwise, she warns, “We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”
It is advisable, I believe, to keep on nodding terms not only with the people we used to be, but also with the people we used to surround ourselves with. Surely, they remind us of who we once were and chart our own growth as we move through different times and new places. But our old friends do more than keep us humble. They remind us that no matter where we may be in the world, we have people — new and old alike — to whom we can turn to make any place a good one.
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