Re-Entry

You can get as mythical as you want, or as mundane- Hero's Journey or simply off to college.  You go somewhere, you do some stuff and then, ideally, you go home.

Do you go home to the same home?  Yes and no.  Things will have changed.  People will have grown, learned, become.  Declined or improved.  Many of the challenges they were facing will have evaporated. New challenges arisen.  

Same for you (for me, of course, since as our anonymous friend will point out this is all about me).  You don't feel different, the you at the center of your universe is still you.  But you have learned a lot.  Some deep stuff. A few core beliefs have shifted.  Parts of the world you were naively certain of are no longer as absolute.

The dynamic I see, and used to feel a lot, is that the traveler goes home expecting things to be more the same than they will be. Those who stayed at home expect the traveler more changed than he is.  Either way, and this is another thing you get used to, it can be fun to explore the changes. The people you were closed to when you left? You were close to them for pretty good reasons.  It will be fun to rediscover them.

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Admin note:

The RSS feed for Wim's blog died for some mysterious reason.  I tried to switch it to his facebook feed and got an error message, so I temporarily moved it down to the 'links' list.