Grateful for the View From Where I Now Stand

Image by @wikisinaloa from Unsplash

There are many "what if" moments in life.

What if I had been born into another family, another culture, another set of circumstances entirely? Would my values have taken the same shape? Would my mind have opened the same doors, or different ones?

We rarely choose the soil we first grow in. The habits of thought, the things we're taught to value, the assumptions so ordinary we never think to question them — these settle into us long before we're old enough to have an opinion about them. And they stay invisible for as long as we stay surrounded by people who share them too.

It's only when we're placed somewhere different — a new environment, a new group of people, a new way of seeing things — that any of it becomes visible at all. Suddenly you're looking back at everything you grew up with from the outside. And from out there, things you'd walked past your whole life suddenly have an outline. A shape. Things you'd absorbed without ever noticing you'd absorbed them.

There's a particular kind of eureka moment that only distance can give you. Not the sudden kind, more the slow-dawning kind — where you catch yourself mid-conversation with someone who sees the world entirely differently, and you realise you're explaining your own upbringing as if seeing it for the first time. You become, briefly, a third person watching your own life. Not judging it. Just finally seeing it.

My husband and I talk about this often — comparing what we each grew up assuming was simply "normal," and how much of that turns out to be one upbringing's normal, not the world's. We don't always land in the same place. When we disagree, we've learned to sit in that rather than rush past it, to try and see the shape of the other's view before defending our own.

It's strange — you don't need to leave in anger, or even leave for long, to feel any of this. You just need enough distance to stop being inside the water and start seeing the shape of the pot.

I don't think I'd have seen any of this half as clearly had I never been moved out of the familiar. Familiarity has a way of hiding in plain sight. It takes standing somewhere else — even briefly, even uncomfortably — to finally see home for what it actually is.

So today, I'm grateful for the going. Grateful for the view that only distance could give me. And grateful, too, for the home I get to see so much more clearly now that I'm no longer standing quite so close to it.