Two years after I moved from Italy to India, as we walked in the park, a friend asked: Do you miss Italy? I smiled, thought a bit, and said, No, I don’t. Really? How about the coffee? Yes, I said. I missed the coffee. That was 31 years ago.
At other times friends, colleagues, people in social situations and planes would ask: why did you come back from the US? Don’t you miss your life there?
While I lived in the US for 14 years, and Italy for six years, I just lived there. Busy and full lives. It all seems so far away. The reality of being based back in India after 20 years didn’t leave much time for nostalgia. It was an even busier life and more challenging than my time in North America and Europe.
As the questions about missing my life in other countries arose, I realised I wasn’t a missing type. When I had to become a boarder in the last two years of high school at the age of 14, it wasn’t home and my parents I missed, but the freedom I had, without the restrictions, rules, and a strict daily regimen of school. In college, in Calcutta (now Kolkata) in the late 1960s, it was the same. As a boarder, we were allowed out twice a week. Being in a city like Calcutta and being treated as a non-adult was hell for me. When I travelled to the US in 1973 and continued to study and work there, people would ask: Do you miss your family? I was a bit ashamed to say, no. Did I miss the food? No.
Many years later, when I started my spiritual journey with the Zen Buddhist monk and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, I wondered if I’d been born with a Zen streak. I was living in the present, wherever I was. I didn’t miss my past and had little anxiety about the future. And this according to Zen Buddhism was a good thing. I was a bit relieved, as I had thought, off and on, maybe something was wrong with me.
Around me, grown adults missed their childhood homes, school friends, teachers, parents, and siblings. I have happy memories of growing up, but I can't say I miss those days or the people around me at that time. When I think of them, it is with fondness and sometimes not, depending on the circumstances and relationships.
Around me were also ambitious adults, who wanted to make money, and rise to the top of their careers. Not me. I had no plans, no career ambitions, and was happy with the work I did and the money I made. I spent what I had with little concern for savings. Not only that, I had no ambition to marry, have a family, or be deeply in love with the one meant for me. Deep down, I knew this was all a fantasy and overrated. I was and am still amused when people ask people: where do you think you’ll be in 5 years, 10 years? I laugh to myself and sometimes out loud and say: Who knows?
I confess I am a bit on the ambitionless side. I liked what I did when I did it. If I got tired of it, I shifted. It was better every time. I didn’t miss what I left behind. Over time, I couldn’t remember half the things that happened to me as I had moved on. I had little time to think of the past or the future. Or to miss anyone or anything. I enjoyed the friends and colleagues I had, the relationships I drifted in and out of, the travels that took me to every continent, the people I met, and the work I did. For me, this was richness.
Later, when I married, had a child, and travelled a lot for professional reasons, people would ask: don’t you miss your family? I didn’t. My son was young, but I was sure he was being well taken of by my very competent husband and household staff. My work was exciting and all-consuming. I was on call most of my waking hours. And the challenges of being a boss often kept me awake at night.
In some cultures, especially traditional ones, family is everything. When I was in Afghanistan in 2006, training Afghan journalists, the young men and women would write poetry on the whiteboard, mostly appreciative of the fact that I left my family behind in India to be with them. It was the ultimate sacrifice, they felt. I was very touched and wondered if I had a heart of stone.
Some time ago, I wanted to write about spaces I had lived in. I counted 24 homes, including the one I live in now. I have to jog my memory and often take the help of photographs when I have them. But since I moved so much, I lost a lot of the photographs, slides, and letters, which people normally hang on to. I got rid of them. With every move, I got lighter and lighter. For example, in moving from a house in Washington DC to Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, I threw out the 400 slides I took on my 1973 trip to Cuba. Do I miss them? No.
My journalist friend Agnes, who I have known since 1980, carries a little notebook and an equally little pencil with her everywhere. She makes meticulous notes wherever she goes and saves every scrap of paper. Thanks to her, for my 70th birthday, she presented me with a beautifully laid out book of letters and postcards from me to her from my travels in various parts of the world, countries I had forgotten I had visited, things I don’t remember I had done or seen. Feelings I don’t recall and challenges I haven't retained. I loved receiving it.
Often, I wish I had Agnes’s talent for keeping meticulous notes and recording my experiences. I started writing a diary now and then, but gave it up, not having the discipline to continue. Over the years, I've written and kept notes in the hope that one day I’ll put them all together, in a memoir. A memoir? A memoir means that a life is memorable. Is my life that memorable, I ask myself? My friend Marilee who I have known since 1979 in an email two years ago asked if I was writing a memoir. No, I replied, I didn’t think my life was that memorable. Are you, I asked?
Often when my two older sisters and I get together, the common refrain is: don’t you remember? I don’t. Since I was born seven years after my oldest sister and 4 years after my second sister, what they are alluding to probably happened before I came along. I was too young to have experienced what they experienced. Sometimes it worries me that I don’t remember many details about my life. But then, I move on, because they don’t matter to my present life.
Many of my friends, older and younger than me, have died. When they come to my mind, I smile and remember the good and bad times we had together. I sometimes remember the meals, the meetings, the arguments, the travel, the laughter, and the love. I am grateful they were in my life. Do I miss them? No.
So, I continue in my un-missing life.
No wonder we 'get' each other so well! We both lack the nostalgia gene. Or maybe it's that the present is so present.