N's Life: A New Chapter

It’s weird being on the road again. It’s even weirder not having a set destination for once. This entire period reminds me of those years on the road at Canonical. As I write this, I am uploading the first draft of what I call “Five OSes RapidFire”, although it will no doubt have a more catchy title by time it goes up.

My entire life has been reduced to a backpack.

In some ways, I feel like I’m being overly dramatic by saying that, since well my apartment in Jersey City still exists. I have the keys, and I have friends checking it for me.

My lease is good until September.

My NAS is sending me emails telling me it completed its backup jobs.

It’s a real place.

But aside from a few brief stopovers, I've barely seen any of it in many months - it might as well exist as theoretical constructs. In a few months, it will all be in storage for the foreseeable future.

Until my situation changes, my existence is limited to what I can carry on my back.

My offline life has largely focused on learning to navigate an unfamiliar city.

It’s figuring out how I am going to buy a car and keep it running on a shoestring budget.

It’s learning to see how far I can really stretch a dollar.

I can say my days are full if nothing else.

One of my biggest victory thus far has been turning a 10 pound bag of flour into dough over the course of a day, and having fresh bread for a week and counting.

Right now, life is figuring just how far I can stretch a dollar.

Life here has its upsides. I've felt better and stronger than I have in a very long time.

Making fresh bread every day goes a long way to helping relieve fears of hunger and  starvation.

I can’t even describe how welcome the silence is.

But despite everything, I find myself with some very unexpected longings for home. Or what passed for home in my life.

It’s especially potent because waking up in a foreign city is not a new thing in my life.

Long ago, I flew to Anchorage with a backpack. I came back a year later with a RAV4 and a bicycle. Other times, work would have me on the road for months at a time. As long as the job gets done, it doesn’t matter if you’re in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, or St. John's, Newfoundland.

As someone who has had more ‘permanent’ addresses than is perhaps recommended or wise, home has always been a relative state of mind for me. Where I am sleeping that night is home.

These feelings of a longing for a lost home bring me back to my years at boarding school. I thought I had grown past this as a person, but I suppose that's one of the lessons of life: you don't always realize what you have until its gone.

However, I have also learned that sometimes giving up everything you have is the best move you can ever make. You just have the be willing to face the consequences if it all goes wrong.

I really hope it doesn't, but that story has yet to be written.

~ N