The larger world is a horrendous location for someone so interpersonal.  Travel brings a cocoon of insulated shopping lists and linguistic holding cells; we clump together in moral norms and wait for the world to catch up, calmly snapping photos at foreign locations served up to ever dollar. The landscapes of our viewfinders, the locales become stories we plan to tell.  We seek future tales, adventures to relate.  The physical horizon broadens but we lose sight of the emotional, the more ephemeral horizons that are intended to expand the mind, fulfill the soul.  We submit to the tyranny of experience to escape the harsh light of mundane bill-paying reality.

The further away we get, the more our lives stack vertical against the foreign tongue.  We seek our language, or our belief, or our culture even if just to sympathetically denigrate it with the multiple expatriates inevitably strewn along the path.  The myriad others who have given up on the core belief that, for every man or woman comes one vote, one voice, one chance to make amends with our future generations, to fulfill the promise of  the past.

The best thing about going away is coming back.

That short sense of relief that all things are in their right places.  That the mess is yours.  That the world turns.

Maybe, though, I am wrong.  Maybe the horizon belongs in the rear, and the world in front of your eyes should be something worth learning.  There is a lot to be said for doing mundane things in exotic locales.  The odds of my being wrong are fairly large.

Ultimately, the world will become what you make of it regardless of your location.

What I selfishly hope is that you will find the energy and escape and, better than escape, the calm that you seek while still somehow maintaining contact.  That your presence in my life will not be as wildly diminished as all the folks who have gone over the horizon.  And that ultimately you return wiser, happier, and better equipped to deal with the vagaries of life.

Your world will expand well outside of any words I can offer.  That won't stop me from writing to you, and you will find those words here, in this forum, unless otherwise notified.