999 days : thoughts on love and expatriotism

 Yesterday I wrote about wanting to get the fuck out of America and then disappeared down a rabbit hole looking for a little essay you wrote once in the café Blue about expatriotism and leaving America and how you'd wanted to leave your entire life.  

Back in 2016 you wrote what you thought was eloquently to the café was:

Whether or not life is being lived in a meaningful way is difficult to say without defining to whom it is supposed to be meaningful (to yourself or to others or the balance of the two) and what the definition of meaningful is (a consumerist version of meaningful, a spiritualist's version of meaningful, to be famous, to be hated, to be loved, etc.)

I choose to interpret meaningful in this open-ended question as whether or not it is meaningful to me and naturally the answer is yes, ("naturally" because if not, what would be the point, living a meaningless life...to have already come to such a conclusion?)

But for some reason the question also reminded me of those ending lines of Saving Private Ryan when he, as the older Private Ryan (addressing Capt. Miller's grave) says:

My family is with me today. They wanted to come with me. To be honest with you, I wasn't sure how I'd feel coming back here. Every day I think about what you said to me that day on the bridge. I tried to live my life the best that I could. I hope that was enough. I hope that, at least in your eyes, I've earned what all of you have done for me.

Is life meaningful based on the choices you make? The number of people whose lives you enter and do not hurt or the number of people whose lives you enter and make better?

I ask myself what it means that someone's life has been meaningful or not, to me. A friend, a lover, a professional contact, a random stranger who dispenses an important message at an important time, a teacher who dispenses knowledge to you that makes life seem more comprehensible or intelligible?

Are you loved? Do you love? These two questions would seem to me to be at the heart of of the question of whether or not you are living a meaningful life.

Not necessarily that you have a spouse or a boyfriend/girlfriend or children but if you are loved by anyone and if you feel love for anyone.

I can state with reasonable certainty that a life without any hint of love in it would be a very difficult life to find meaning in. (I would also underscore that this is the love of or for a person as opposed to a deity who is alleged to dispense unconditional love to anyone who asks for it which to me, is more like hope than love...)

So if I define living a life that is meaningful to be a life that has love in it, then the answer is yes, I am living a meaningful life.

That was not always the case when life seemed like a series of one loveless wound after another. But it is now.

Is it meaningful to be happy or to feel happy? Presumably that love element contributes to the sensation of happiness. (not always the case in the end but always the case for at least the duration of that love).

I find it difficult to be happy but I do not find that fact diminishes the sense of living a meaningful life. The unhappiness is a primary motivator, a prod to do more rather than an impediment.

Ignorance is bliss, so the expression goes, but ignorance does not seem to be a primary element of living a meaningful life.

Does life seem to have more meaning as the days dwindle, when you have lived more years than you will reasonable expect to live in the future (given the average mortality rate, let's say once you are older than 40)? Do those years lived give you a better perspective on what life is and what is to be expected from it and what it expects from you?

What accomplishments (bucket list-style accomplishments aside) make the life lived seem more meaningful?

My biggest accomplishment on a personal level, was escaping America.

Not because America is an evil place (the argument is often made by those who don't understand it but I still think of America as a beautiful country), but because it never felt like home.

I've wanted to live in Europe since I was a child, firstly out of childish curiosity (a world photo atlas which included a photo of factory workers in Bologne, a Greek girl holding a lamb, etc.) then later because Europe seemed like the only reasonable answer, finding a place where feeling out of place felt natural rather than a poignant sensation of not belonging.

I could be living a meaningful life in America as well but it would seem less meaningful to me because it I would not be where my heart has always been.

People who are not Parisians often tell me that I am lucky to live in Paris and I am. But living in a city, even Paris, diminishes it's luster ever so slightly. I see so many people, tourists, that is, coming to Paris and I watch their eyes beholding what it seems to be a miracle. The city of love. The city of light, etc. I see every day, the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tour and it never ceases to blow me away because it is places like that which place me here, which make me stop for a moment and realise that I am here. You would be surprised after three years, how often that realisation gets lost in the every day of living. Things which you see or do by habit or which seem to be customary, only seem so because they are, in a sense, customary. And that is the luxury. Not to see it from the tourist eye, and not from the jaded eye of a native Parisian, but from the eye of the permanantly displaced.

It seems to me that I am living a meaningful life not because I am in Paris or because I am in love or because I love speaking and reading the language every day (which I do love) but because I was able to do what I wanted to do, to escape and to reach the continent. (England was not the escape despite my passport, but the means of furthering the ultimate dream, which was to be in Europe and as the Brexit fans are so hell-bent on pointing out, England is not Europe.)