I am never satisfied with where I am.  And I think I speak for a number of Canadians when I say that I wish I was on a beach right now.  This rings especially true when one has to deal with Montreal winters which seem to drag on 3 months too long.  Now, today is honestly a pretty sweet day.  Minimal wind, minimal clouds, sunshine, about 13 degrees, no rain… but I’m still not satisfied. 

Sure the weathers nice, but I still have to balance my service job and university, and I still have finals to study for, and yeah, okay, summer is just around the corner, but I would kill to be anywhere near… well, pretty much anywhere else. The kicker is that I know if I’m away for too long, I know I’ll miss Montreal.  And there is no way around this for me.

When I think back to the last time that I was completely and utterly content with my physical location in the world, I always flash back to my Pacific West Coast bike trip.  And I’m sorry I know my friends who are reading this probably want to kill me because I still won’t shut up about it.

ANYWAY, I fucking miss that trip.  And whenever I would try to pinpoint why exactly I was so happy with where I was, I could never really figure it out.  But I realized that the reason I was so content because, well, I was never really anywhere.  We were on the road for a good month and half, making decisions on the fly, and doing pretty much whatever we wanted, however we wanted.

I was in a constant state of flux.  Never setting up camp anywhere for longer than 12 hours.  Never staying anywhere for longer than a second really, at least while on the bike…  My roommate/tripmate and I were constantly on the move, constantly moving towards a new location.  There was never really an ultimate destination.  We kinda just kept going until we felt like stopping.

And obviously I didn’t fully appreciate where I was (or wasn’t…) at the time.  Such is the nature of travel/life.  You never appreciate where you are when you’re there.  You will yearn to go back only when you can’t (But that’s how you know it was worth it).

Is the grass greener on the otherside? No, but only because there’s no grass on the other side. You think there’s grass, and you think it’s green, but then you get to the other side and realize its astroturf -  But seriously think about it, the astroturf is like this ideal form of grass, and you feel it, and its almost unreal - you can’t understand how grass can be this amazing and rich. The astroturf offers a really great alternative, but you know if you stayed there too long, it would start feeling like plastic (or whatever the hell astroturf is made of).  If you were constantly able to go back to that one place you constantly wish you were, it would lose its wonder, and would no longer be “that place”.

And then you go back to your side, your grass.  And while you may long for the perfect blades of perfectly green astroturf on the other side, your grass (k I promise this post is not a giant metaphor for pot) offers your more comfort than the weird fake stuff across the way ever offered you.  The only way to appreciate anything is to be away from it (which kind of sucks I guess); and it’s the potentiality that we may never experience the perfection of that secluded beach or the blue of the San Francisco sky on a summer day in June that makes life awesome.  The rarity and novelty of those moments you will probably only experience once in a lifetime, and the fact that no matter how hard you try, you will never be able to explain it to anyone else.

That being said, I can’t wait to come back to Montreal whenever I leave.