geography is destiny

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and a friend brought the topic up the other day.
I tend to agree with him, living in Memphis was a very unique experience that shaped the course of my life in a lot of unexpected ways. When you get right down to it, living in Memphis is so profoundly different than living anywhere else. I can't do it justice with mere words, but back there and then, there were so many tragically beautiful and profoundly fucked up things that just can’t be replicated anywhere else. Living in a place where you can see every spectrum of the human experience is bound to have a profound effect on you. In any given day I could count on seeing almost anything at all, ugliness and beauty, sadness and bravery, hatred and love, the best and worst of human nature...in a way that I just don't think happens anywhere else. There are a thousand places that are far more exciting than Memphis, but I think the facade is thinner there than anywhere. Everything felt ten times more real than it does anywhere else, and at least ten times as unpredictable. People lived with a greater intensity than I've seen anywhere else.

One thing I’ve discovered in my nomadic life is that geography is destiny. Where you are has a profound influence on what your life is like. The variables you have to work with in a given place are so different when you compare living in Kabul, Afghanistan versus Dayton, Ohio. A person living in either of those places is bound to turn out differently...Where you are in the world matters a great deal.

Sometimes I can’t believe how different my life is every time I move someplace different. It’s like becoming a whole new person every time you pick up your feet and move. It's incredibly hard to deal with sometimes, because it is a process of identity re-configuration. In fact, it feels like wherever I go, I inevitably leave something major behind and have to add some new piece to this crazy patchwork quilt of experiences to make up for what I lost, and in the end barely recognize what the new configuration is…

It would be hard to quantify, if asked what kind of effect living in Memphis had on me overall. I think only someone who's been there can truly understand it.