Happy and Alive at the Center of the World

The other day in my post about Abbey's book, The Journey Home:  Some Words in Defense of the American West, I got a little (ok, a lot) sidetracked into considering the different understandings that a single individual can have of a place, and the understandings that two different individuals can have of a place.

My intention, before I was sidetracked, was to pull out a few quotes that resonated with me in the book.

So, focus, focus, focus: here is one:

This is a remote place indeed, far from the center of the world, far away from all that's going on.  Or is it?  Who says so?  Wherever two human beings are alive, together, and happy, there is the center of the world. You out there, brother, sister, you too live in the center of the world, no matter where or what you think you are.   

 ----From Edward Abbey, The Journey Home

When I was a teenager, I used to climb up on top of the big ridge across from my house at night, in the winter.  I'd look out over the hillside where there were a very few scattered lights.  I'd think to myself that the world was happening elsewhere, somewhere beyond that hill, someplace where there were lots of lights and people and human activity.   I felt that I was off on the edge of something, or in a far corner, and I dreamed that someday I would go to where that center was.  I guess I was imagining a place like Boston or New York City.

At the same time that I felt remote from everything that mattered, I recall being acutely attuned to my immediate surroundings, and I experienced that kind of expansiveness of the self that comes from, what, I don't know, an openness and appreciation to all the sensory data flowing in from the immediate world.  I was both intensely happy and intensely sad.  And I felt both full and sufficient in myself, and lonely and inadequate because I was so far from the center.

Since those years, I've traveled to and lived in many places, places that my younger self would have considered the center--Boston, D.C., New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, Madrid, Paris, London.  And after years of that, when I was still living in the densely settled suburbs of Washington, D.C., I was craving a move back to a rural environment.

But I found myself falling into that old way of thinking:  I was scared that I might feel off at the edges, away from and out of touch with everything that mattered.  I worried that once I got settled back into a rural area, I'd long for the bustle of the city and the suburbs, and regret the move.

Now that I've been here in rural New Mexico for awhile, I find that I don't miss the city and suburbs at all.  Well, I guess I do miss the museums, but there are museums around here that I can explore, if I have a hankering to do so.  I don't at all feel regretful about moving to this area and away from all that human activity.  In one sense, I do feel off at the edges of things, far from the center, but I'm liking that feeling.  I'm relieved to see that I can be here and have it be a full and meaningful experience.  In fact, I feel like it's more meaningful than many of those other places I've been, because there's a lot less hustle and bustle of traffic, signs, buses, stores, etc. to fragment my attention into multiple, incoherent directions.

One point that I would differ with Abbey is in his assertion that it's where "two humans are alive, together, and happy," that is the center of the world.  I'm not knocking being with another person, happy and alive; that's fantastic and can sometimes enhance the feeling that one is at the center of the world.  But I think it entirely possible for one person, alive and aware, to live at the center of the world, wherever that person might be.