States of Being

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

Marcel Proust

“Do you live here, or are you just visiting?”

This is a question I’ve had many times over the course of the past four months, and it’s not as straightforward to answer as it might seem. In reality, I’m just visiting: rather than a permanent address, I have onward tickets booked for the next place, and the next. But just visiting also conjures an image of a weekend away, or a holiday, and those aren’t things I’m doing, either.

I don’t even really feel like I’m “travelling”, even though it seems the best word to describe my current lifestyle. I spent upwards of two weeks, usually more like a month, in each location. I try to acclimatise as much I as I can: I stock the fridge and cook; I do loads of laundry and clean up around the apartments I stay in; I work from dining room tables or local libraries or poky coffee shops. Very little of my time is spent doing the things that we associate with travelling. I visit museums or national landmarks occasionally; I eat out once in a while, preferably with new friends I’ve made along the way when possible. 

To try and categorise what I’m doing outwith the realm of travelling, however, seems to ignore the privilege of being able to change location every few weeks and live comfortably while doing so. Not even just from a point of financial privilege (while part of it, my lifestyle on-the-go is no more or less expensive than living in major cities like Toronto and London, as I have in the past) but that of freedom of movement, granted to me by holding three strong passports. 

Instead, I’ve started to think about it as changes in my state of being, adapting as it is from location to location. My state of being is defined not just by the place I am in, but what I am doing with my time there. How long I stay. Where I live. Who I meet. You could say that my life in Rome and my life in Copenhagen amounted to the same thing: I was just “travelling”. But to consider it as a state of being, those two lives were entirely distinct. 

In Rome, I was a student again. I spent my mornings in class, with a short break to chat with my classmates over coffee, and my afternoons napping (a pastime largely retired to my university days, at least in its frequency). I drank cheap wine over bowls of crisps with friends from school at aperitivo hour. I wrote basically nothing, all month.

In Livorno, I became the stereotype of the writer: I became a hermit. I saw no one for close to two weeks, save for the local cashiers at the supermarket. I drank wine every night and watched films during the day with the shutters drawn tight. I also wrote an entire film script in ten days.

Then, I emerged from my cave of isolation again, and arrived in Copenhagen. And it was in considering my state of being in Copenhagen that I realised why I felt so immediately at home there. It was not just that life seemed to function so seamlessly and logically; it was not just that my Nordic roots melted me into the crowd while I always stuck out in Italy. It was that my state of being in Copenhagen was the closest to my “normal life” that I had encountered on this journey so far.

I went for long runs or walks around my neighbourhood. I stopped for coffee and a cardamom bun in the local bakery. I worked and reworked my script. I did some copyediting for a freelance client. I spent late nights in bars with new friends. I sat in the park admiring the spring blossoms and soaking in the first warm rays of sun of the year in this part of the world.

It was this combination of elements that made Copenhagen feel like home, very fast, and quite all-consumingly. That is not to negate how much I love the city: if I had to choose right now where to live forever, I would go there without hesitation. If anything, maybe it taught me that choosing a home is not even so much about finding a place you really like—but, rather, about finding a place in which you can live the life that you like. (The strong social system, access to green spaces, and new friends certainly didn’t hurt, either.)

In the midst of my time in Denmark, I went to visit my parents in Scotland for a week. I went home. There, home to me means only the house in which my parents live; the same house in which I grew up from the age of five onwards. I like the house, and I really like spending time with my parents (at least, until my mother starts questioning all my life choices again, at which point it’s usually time to go). It wouldn’t really matter where the house itself is, for the city holds little meaning to me. 

My state of being in that house is not one of normal routine, but it is one of comfort. I know how the house operates. I know where I’ll sleep and I know what time we’ll eat and I know how my parents like things done. In effect, my state of being when I visit is that of my parents’—it is that of a retiree. It’s safe. It’s easy. But I’m not quite ready to retire yet, so my visits can only last so long.

I recently arrived back to Finland, a country in which I have simultaneously always felt at home while also always having a sense that I am a bit of an outsider. My Finnish isn’t perfect, and I really don’t know any of the local slang that is used frequently here. Sometimes, it feels like people can tell I’m not really from here, despite the blonde hair and the blue eyes and the face and the language and the passport. 

I haven’t often spent much time here without my family, so it is also different to be here alone. But I buy groceries and no one tries to talk to me in English, and I get halfway through the process of renewing my passport and I can see that my state of being here will be easy to find. It might be some odd combination of previous experiences: some of the normality of Copenhagen, with parts of the isolation and work-focus of Livorno. It’s not quite the state that I find when spending quiet summers out by the lake, but those never are, not are they meant to be, done alone. 

It’s raining as I write this and despite being by myself, after becoming overly accustomed again with having friends nearby, I feel settled. I feel content. I have a classic Finnish dish heating in the oven and everything in my fridge has the magical word “laktoositon” (lactose-free) written on it. And maybe that’s enough to make a place feel like home, if only for a little while.