Dan in Transit

I am near single-handedly fulfilling London's daily carbon emissions limit. With infuriatingly frequent assistance from the Blackwall and Rotherhithe tunnels - in the form of their almost daily closure - I am regularly making like Tiger Woods at the tee, and driving a long way.

But that's not the only way that I find myself in motion; I have a temporary place to live and a temporary job, and even the car that I use to choke Mother Earth to within an inch of her government-authorised carbon limitations is borrowed. I haven't lived in one place for more than a year since I left Loughton for University in 2002 (and there's a clue in there, incidentally, about whether or not I stayed the course of higher education).

And I love my life of transience. I'm sure there will come a time when I'll feel the gravitational pull of one particular place, and then I'll know to settle down - there's no point trying to fight gravity, after all. But right now, I love meeting new people, finding myself in foreign surroundings, and doing things that I've never done before.

I like Jack Kerouac's description of Mississippi Gene's life in On the Road; it speaks to me:

'...crossing and recrossing the country every year, south in the winter and north in the summer, and only because he had no place he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, keep rolling under the stars, generally the Western stars.'

Progress

I am not a person who rushes making big decisions. I don't think this is true for everyone, but in my life a fairly significant choice will have to be made, on average, about once a year. My reaction is pretty consistent every time; I decide to take some time to pray, I pray, and then I fester. I wait for ages, partly pondering, partly hoping that the decision will be made for me. I think I know some of the reasons for this behaviour, but that's a whole other post right there. The point is, I don't make the big decisions in a hurry.

So when I chose to return from Arna to England in the summer, it was with a conviction that it was the right thing to do - that God had some way in which I could be useful to Him here. But that isn't really the way it's gone down so far; since September I've probably experienced the least productive four months of my adult life. I don't want to go into detail or try and analyse it here, but it's fair to say that the blogosphere hasn't been missing a great deal in my absence.

Adaptation, a film written by Charlie Kaufman, is (in part) a dramatisation of the writer's struggles in adapting the screenplay of the film, from a book about orchids. At one point, when Kaufman is at his most overwhelmed, despairing at his lack of productivity and inability to focus, he has a vision in which the author's photo on the dust cover of The Orchid Thief starts speaking to him. Like some kind of Native American spirit guide, but in hardback form, she counsels him, helping him see how to move forward. She makes him realise that he needs to draw his focus away from the situation as a whole and focus on the smaller issues, one at a time.

And that's sort of how things worked out for me. I didn't get a mystic vision from the bookcase but, one by one, things have begun to fall into order. Relationships that had depreciated in my time abroad have revived, thanks to the support of old friends. Tim and Vikki's wedding helped me to see again how valuable my family are - especially my parents, brothers and new sister. I've also managed to come by steady employment, a house to live in that's near my new place of work and a car to travel between the former and the latter.

It's a good start, and quite a leap from my situation a month ago. I still can't see too much of the path ahead, but I am looking forward to walking it, which is not something I've been able to say with confidence for a while.