Yesterday afternoon, on the promenade in Burgos, Spain, I remembered that I had moved to Europe. It was a sunny day, a Monday, and between the shady park along the river and a row of café and restaurants with outdoor tables all full, there walked a constant stream of people, dogs, strollers, little kids, old folks in wheelchairs being pushed by their adult children, people eating ice cream, clusters of boys and girls chattering, and a woman with an electric guitar crooning out Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here.”
What happens when you live in a place is that you start taking it for granted, or at least for normal. I had to remind myself this was 6 p.m. on a Monday, and there were easily thousands of people out just … walking around. Because why wouldn’t they be? They’re Spanish. Or just European. Some other voice in my head kicked in and asked, “Where in the United States would this be happening right now? And in Europe, it’s happening all over the place, every day.”
And then, it was like the two voices in my head – this is normal and this is extraordinary – got together and reminded me that what was once a dream is now a reality: This is actually where I live.
In the moment before that moment, I was looking at the same scene and thinking things like, “Here I am, alone, again,” and “I can’t understand what people are saying,” and even “What am I doing out here?” I don’t know what switched me from one moment to another, aside from alternate realities having a way of popping into the stream here and there. Sometime it’s a memory on Facebook or something: Five years ago this week, I posted that bittersweet photo of Mount Hood in my rearview mirror as I drove through Central Oregon, on the way to a summer in the Rockies, having left my Portland life behind.
And now here I was, by the river in Burgos, eating an ice cream, and feeling so at-home that I was not thinking, “Holy crap, I live here,” but instead about normal day-to-day things like my social state, my work, what to have for dinner, and so on. So we make moves, we adjust to new settings, and the old stuff we like to think about comes back up … and then occasionally something else comes in, like a view from a meadow on the side of a ridge, and you look back and say, “Damn, I’m way up here. I’m walking up this mountain.”
It’s still out there, that sense of wonder. I get it sometimes just walking down the street in Madrid, or getting a 10 Euro haircut and 20 Euro bag of groceries while my clothes are in the 4 Euro dryer, or right before a game kicks off and I feel like the only tourist at a big game in the Segunda División, or I step off a train in a mountain town and pop in for a quick coffee before I follow the old Roman road into the forest.
Wonder is like an old friend that comes around sometimes to encourage me, remind me where I came from and how far I’ve travelled, and tell me I’m still on the chosen path.