In a way, our sabbatical had prepared us well for this moment, this pandemic and all the ensuing unexpectation that follows. You can say that we’ve unknowingly been training for this particular moment, when we have to be content with the uncertainty of the liminal space we are in, with not knowing what the future holds for us, with the new constraints that are suddenly imposed on all of us.
It’s time to be slow / Lie low to the wall / Until the bitter weather passes.
We’ve traded our muddy trekking shoes for two second-hand bicycles; fate and serendipity had put us in Utrecht, the Netherlands, our home for the foreseeable future. It’s funny how a country we never even considered as a stopping point became a possible denouement out of the blue, and within a few months, we’re here, settling into the daily rhythm of our new existence.
The process of turning a place into a home feels the same as any other time we arrived at a new location. We make space in the corner for the little belonging we have. Each day the kitchen gets increasingly filled with the staple spices and condiments we use in our cooking. The apartment is smelling more like home each week, and we’re also getting used to the earthy tone of the apartment. One day we wake up & know that it’s our nest now.
Everyone wants to know why we chose the Netherlands, how we ended up here, why Utrecht of all places. And we’ve learned to make up stories that help people make sense of our paths, because no one believes us when we said that it just happened: we followed a breadcrumb of opportunities that lead us to where we are now. Alas, fate and serendipity are notions reserved for romantic fools, who have no place whatsoever in the practical Dutch minds. So we improvised: the start-up ecosystem in the Netherlands seems right for us, and besides… we love the bicycle culture over here. That seems to satisfy the curiosity.
We are a bunch of crazies, I know. Our track record says so. Who knows what kind of madness drives us to maintain this habit of leaping into the unknown head-first with very little planning or forethought. We left the States for our sabbatical roughly 1 month after we decided to do it. We drove 20,000 km north from Cape Town in our beat-up 25-year-old Land Rover 2 months after we decided to overland from South Africa to Ethiopia. We started a company in a foreign country we knew nothing about 3 months after we decided to do our own business. Things that are supposed to be carefully planned for months or years in advance, we barrelled into like a pair of insolent children. If you didn’t know us, you would think that we’re a pair of compulsive gamblers addicted to the high of chancing our lives to fate.
The truth is: there is no high that we’re after with this unorthodox lifestyle. There’s always the background of fear, uncertainty and doubt. “What the hell are we doing?” is a prominent chatter at the foreground of my mind. Here we are in our late thirties, starting over in a foreign soil, when most of our friends are spreading their roots deeper into the ground. The gravity of what ‘starting over’ really means smacked me in the face the other day as I mumbled some broken Dutch to the cashier at the grocery store. I wanted to make small talk and joke with her about this pre-dinner crowd rush, but my vocabulary has been reduced to that of a two year old. When we’re waiting in line at the immigration office, it felt like déjà vu. I thought I was done with trying to assert my worth to some foreign bureaucrats: Yes, I’ll be a productive member of your society. Yes, I’ll behave and stay away from all criminal enterprises, though don’t count on me to not jaywalk across the street. This is what it feels like to be back to square one.
Try, as best as you can, not to let / The wiry brush of doubt / Scrape from your heart / All sense of yourself / And your hesitant light
I have been wondering: Did we really choose this itinerant life?
I won’t speak for Gabriel as his story is his. But I know mine. The rootlessness. The feeling of never truly belonging to a place. The experience of growing up as a minority in a country that never accepted me as their own, no matter how many generations have settled and called it their only home. The experience of always feeling like an immigrant in the US no matter what passport I carry, how flawless my English is or how ‘integrated’ I am into the society. I’m not complaining. It’s not a sob story. My experience is the reason why I’ve found so many dear friends who also feel as unmoored to the ground as I do. I believe there’s even a cool label for us: citizen of the world, which is a misnomer in the current global environment that seems to favor nationalists and nativists.
My point being: home has always been a concept I struggle with. Decades of being a stranger in a strange land have made ‘home’ a metaphysical concept. I know this in the core of my being: home is not a physical space that can be charted on a map, bought and owned on paper. Yet I struggle with the contradiction: how is it that I was able to carry my home with me always, yet never can call any place my home. How can home be nowhere and everywhere?
The rootless thus become a restless wanderer.
If you remain generous / Time will come good; / And you will find your feet / Again of fresh pastures of promise, / Where the air will be kind / And blushed with beginning.
The joy of not having planned this whole sojourn in the Low Lands is that we have absolutely no expectation and get pleasantly surprised by little things, like the amazing bike system throughout the country, the directness of people, the amazing dairy and cheese products, and the abundance of Indonesian food and ingredients. I don’t think there’s any other country in the world where I’ll be able to find emping melinjo (Indonesian nut cracker) or kecap manis (Indonesian sweet soy sauce) in the main aisle of the local neighborhood grocery stores (i.e. not specialty Asian grocery stores). Learning Dutch informally has also been fun as I can draw on German grammar supplemented with English + German vocabulary, and all the Indonesian-Dutch loanwords.
If I was the mystic kind, I would connect all the dots in the past that made our current path an obvious conclusion. Of course the Netherlands! It has the largest concentration of Indonesian abroad! Or I would point out that my last name (two Indonesian words my dad picked randomly out of a phone book one strange day in 1965. Now that’s a story for another day): tirta and jana, means water and person in Sanskrit. I’m a water person. So yes, go to the country whose land is already under water! You get the gist… But I won’t. Because I believe it’s way more exciting to think that the randomness of the universe could occasionally converge into these serendipities.
It’s a new chapter, a new home, and our story is just beginning. I don’t know yet what this new adventure has in store for us. But it sure as hell won’t be dry.
This Is the Time to Be Slow by John O’Donohue This is the time to be slow Lie low to the wall Until the bitter weather passes Try, as best you can, not to let The wire brush of doubt Scrape from your heart All sense of yourself And your hesitant light. If you remain generous, Time will come good; And you will find your feet Again on fresh pastures of promise, Where the air will be kind And blushed with beginning.