Full disclosure, I have no idea what I’m doing.

That’s a overstatement, obviously. I’ve done a ton of research, bought gear and reconsidered and threw it out, swapped bank accounts and residences, wrote a whole website to handle tracking and visas and the like.¹ I’ve done a lot of preparation. But as I’m sitting here in the decidedly uncharming terminal of the mellifluously-named ORD² I can reasonably say that I am, to put it mildly, terrified.

There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. It’s the same thing you feel when you’re standing in the wings waiting for your cue, when you’re standing at the edge of the high dive shaking out your arms to try and remove a tremor that just won’t subside. At a certain point, you have to have faith in something — your preparations or fate or at the very least gravity. Calamities usually aren’t, or to put it another way, I’ve lived through enough genuine disasters to know that, whatever happens, I’ll get through it. All you need to do is take a deep breath and jump.

Let’s step back a moment, for those who haven’t been hearing me talk about this obsessively for the past six months. I’m sitting in O’Hare with the entirety of my immediate possessions beside me packed into a single carry-on and a single personal item.³ The total weight is under 10 kg. I’ve given up my apartment, divested myself of basically all my stuff, and am preparing to leave the United States for … well, for as long as I can. Maybe forever.

Three months ago I quit the job that required me to stay in New York City; today I’m leaving. I’m simply going to travel. See places I haven’t seen. Revisit places I have. Catch up with old friends. Make new ones.

The reasons I’m leaving are complicated. I’ve lived in New York City for over 12 years, longer than I’ve lived anywhere with the exception of the house I grew up in, and it remains the only place I’ve ever wanted to live. Every place else I moved for work or college. New York I chose, although it never really felt like that. Moving to New York City was like arriving at a summer camp and discovering there was one other person there who had read The Chronicles of Narnia from cover-to-cover and had strong opinions about Ursula K. LeGuin and you don’t choose to spend your summer arguing about books and movies with them, rather than swimming. You just do. I’m simpatico with New York, in a way I doubt I’ll ever be with anyplace else.

But while I love the city, I can see all the friends I struggled to make leaving, one by one, heading to the West Coast or Europe or even just the suburbs of New Jersey⁴ and I find myself reluctant and ill-equipped to make new ones and start another five year cycle. Coupled with that is the fact I’ve already been travelling to Europe a lot the past few years, and I’ve made quite a few friends overseas whom I don’t see all that often. Faced with fewer friends near me, and more friends farther away, travel starts to sound more like home than home does.

Politics, of course, is another good reason to leave. As I’ve said before, the horrible things happening in the United States just seem like an extension of the horrible things happening all over; we may not be summarily executing “drug dealers” like in the Philippines or firing a third of the judiciary like Poland, but it’s all on the same continuum. But even so, this is my circus, these are my monkeys, and if I’m going to have to live someplace going through hell without being able to influence the outcome I’d at least like it to be someplace where it doesn’t feel like a personal betrayal.

If it were just one bad⁵ administration, it would be one thing. But there are structural issues at play here (the electoral college, the rural/urban voting divide, decades of partisan gerrymandering) coupled with a Democratic party that can’t effectively question or challenge the underlying issues⁶ which suggests to me it’s going to get worse before it gets better. I hope I’m wrong on that, but I’d rather be wrong on that from outside the US than right on that from inside.

But I don’t think even all of the above would have convinced me to leave, on its own.

I’ve been reading a fair amount about Gnosticism⁷ recently, and one of their ideas is called the tripartite view. It acknowledges that humans are composed of body and soul (Genesis describes God sculpting the clay and breathing into the nostrils to create man). But it further suggests that there’s a deeper, hidden part, a spirit, separate from them. For Gnostics, the God of the Old Testament is a false god, who created the material world and all life in it in error.⁸ For them this spirit is a sliver of the true God, a spark⁹ of the divine within each of us. Your goal in life is to see through the illusions of the material world, to move past the limitations of body and soul, and escape through the transcendent knowledge of that divine spark.¹⁰

What do I take from all that? I guess I’d say it’s easy to fall into a routine, to fall asleep in the same place you woke up, to find a routine you enjoy and the wear the grooves down through repetition until it no longer resembles the thing you enjoyed in the first place. Maybe I just need to hit the reset button on everything about once a decade.

As much as I love New York, I’ve seen it. I’m leaving not because I can’t see myself living there forever, but because I can. So I’m jumping off the edge of the world, and I’m putting my faith in the quest, not the grail.

Let’s see where it goes.

Next: London (STN) to Stockholm (NYO)

Footnotes

¹ It was an excuse to learn a lot of technologies I wanted to learn.

² Fun fact: O’Hare is called ORD because the original airport was called Orchard Field.

³ Okay, to be fair there’s two overstuffed duffle bags in the cargo hold of the flight full of costume pieces which I’m dumping, as soon as humanly possible, at a friend’s place. But I am most assuredly not hauling them all over the place.

⁴ Let’s be honest, I’ve spent more time in Europe over the past year than I’ve spent in New Jersey.

⁵ “Bad” here standing in for being massively racist, unabashedly hostile to the poor and minorities, and revanchist kleptocratic buffoons.

⁶ Which I peg as income inequality, FWIW.

⁷ Briefly: a splinter group of Christians that formed some rather heretical views of Christianity before finally being stamped out — although a surprising amount of their philosophy has influenced many revolutionary ideas, from Catharism to The Matrix.

⁸ So you can kind of see how this struck other Christians as slightly heretical.

⁹ There is a surprising amount of Gnostic thought underpinning the Transformers theology.

¹⁰ People who do that are called “pneumatics.” I am not kidding.