Antipodean Notes

At times past, being far away from home afforded the opportunity to see our lives, looking back at that life from far away, as though others, not us, are living them; physical distance created psychic distance, too. No more. Communications technology now is such that even vast distances mean nothing. But even beyond that, being 10,000 miles away did not produce the changed perspective I expected. Wondering why lead me to thinking that now, on the downside of the sine curve of life, it's time, not distance, which is the predicate to seeing one's life from a perspective removed from life's preoccupations. The shock of distance, this time, produced the realization that while my current view of myself did not change, what I think about myself is vastly different than what I saw as a younger man, when physical distance did cause me to see myself differently than I did when in my own environment. Put differently, when I was young the simple fact of distance caused me to reassess whether the life I was living, back there where I lived, was satisfying; invariably, that self-assessment caused me to adjust my thinking in beneficial ways not likely to have occurred to me had I not so radically changed in point of space. However now, a change of space did not spur any changes; rather, it caused me to realize that some of the important presuppositions guiding my conception of myself as a younger man were now not only no longer important, but just flat wrong. Had I been able to see this when I was younger, things would quite likely have turned out vastly different for me. My myopic view did not change in space as much as I thought it did; otherwise, I would have come to the realizations which I now know time, not space, afforded me. I guess there's just no getting a jump on hindsight.