If it’s the rainy season here, is it spring or fall in
Vermont?
If it’s 6am in Hanoi, what time is it in Asheville?
Has all this moving around ruined me for being wholly in one place? I’m not sure I even want to be anyway. I think about
many of my various homes in the course of any day, kind of like living in
multiple worlds all at once. The Internet
and Facebook make this even easier- I have regular updates from my friends
around the world, I can check on weather and news from everywhere I’ve ever
lived or might be moving to in the future. Mostly it is a good thing, I think, but at
times I find myself disoriented, forgetting which season it is or what part of
the school year we’re in. Conversations with
settled friends about long-term plans can be awkward. I’m never entirely sure where we’ll be this
time next year but I still need to go through the motions of making arrangements as if I will be. 
Am I more prepared to cope with unexpected drastic change than so-called
“settled” people? Even the most settled-seeming lifestyle can be rocked to the
core by unforeseen events and I have had some rigorous exercise in living with
uncertainty and readjusting to new circumstances. 
Am I losing my perspective, living in the United States for nearly 4 years in a row now? Sometimes I feel like life is too easy for us here- the phone almost always works, as does the electricity, the heat. There's usually a hospital nearby, within an hour drive, no flight to another country is usually necessary to find a specialist. We bathe in water clean enough to drink. The roads on which we drive are smooth and straight. Sure, there are pot-holes but nothing big enough to swallow a vehicle or make a 10-mile trip be exhausting from being thrown all over the car. We have to work hard to find things to complain about but we still manage to do a lot of it, to find discomfort everywhere. I try to remember that we have it easy, not to layer on the guilt, but to try to appreciate what we have.
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