Stranger Faces

As ideas came and went for making a living I found myself slowly adapting to this new life against all the odds and in the face of friends and family thinking I am utterly crazy not to return home but to do so simply didn't feel right for me. If there is anything i had learnt even by this time, it was to do what feels right no matter how hard or foolish it sounds - the feeling is far more reliable, I have found, than left brain driven "reasons" with their hidden agenda for safety and inertia.

Stranger Faces

Sat in a corner window overlooking the central street of the old city in Chiang Mai at its busiest time of the week, Sunday evening’s street market, I see the many faces that come to pick and choose the many colourful gifts that will soon adorn homes across the globe as their adventure ends and they return to their daily life at home. For me, though ‘farang’ (Western), I am now home, truly home, as my heart has chosen this to the exclusion of the land that saw me grow into what I have now become, a writer and adventurer for whom fear no longer acts as a deterrent for action.

Those many faces from all walks of life and many cultures will largely return to the safety of their existence in their own home countries, their own nurturing society, never to experience the challenges of rebirth in a foreign land, naked, divested of all familiar vestiges of a former life. As I struggle through this period of initial acclimatisation, I could almost envy the easy way home that many will follow, yet in reality nothing but nothing would have me short-change my heart and soul on what they have chosen and now enjoy more than endure.

Understanding this helps me celebrate my achievements to date: the gradual adjustment to this colourful yet sometimes unforgiving land; the eager absorption of a new culture; the slightly self-conscious attempts to speak a sometimes musical, sometimes harsh sounding tongue; the determination to make a life for myself in the face of any and all adversity. And as I receive my first draft brochure that will hopefully allow me to begin to make a living here, I feel proud, exhilarated, anxious and, above all, at home.