Thoughts of Toronto and other distant places

Sitting in the Taxi at 1am this morning, approaching Downtown Toronto I was pensive. This is the city of my birth, and has followed me on every visa application, every immigration form and a large number of different forms I've had to fill out over the course of time. I only lived here till l I was 3 (which is when we moved back to India), and when I returned to Canada many years later, I moved instead to Montreal. Toronto has never held that much meaning for me personally. It never could hold as much for me as for my parents who lived here for 8 years during the 1970s.

At one point last year, I considered moving to Toronto to work. I had a few interviews, but nothing ever panned out. I got to walk around the city a bit, but didn't have much of a feel of the city even then. I often wonder what it would be like...to move again. Could Toronto be a place I would grow to love? Would I grow to learn every nook, every cranny? Up till this point, I have never felt very emotionally connected to the place. It granted me Canadian Citizenship, it was a place my parents were very fond of, but other than that it was not somewhere I thought about. Then again, I had no emotional connect to New York when I moved, and I grew to love it. New York has been very good to me, much better than Montreal, a city that I loved at first sight. Toronto could be the same way. Slow to warm to me.

Not that I am planning a move any time soon. But it definitely got me thinking. What about people that will never move out of their county? Or off their street? The thing for me was my lack of choices, especially being a Canadian in the United States. To get a good job, I was willing to move to Texas, to Ohio or to Oregon for the right position. I had to be open, I was forced to be open. But then, is that such a bad thing? I hear people say they would not live in place X or place Y, or they would DEFINITELY never want to live in place Z. Sometimes I doubt these people have even visited the places they look at with such disdain. I guess you make a choice - to be open or not. You make a choice as to how open you are. But is it really such a good idea to deny something you have never tried? And is it bad to choose not to try?

I don't know the answer. But I do know this...I want to be open. I want to feel free to make choices, and not scorn that which I do not understand. It's the best way to learn, and in some circumstances the only way. I learned more about who I was in a foreign country than I ever did at home. Distance gives you perspective and a different kind of wisdom. It gives you something much deeper than that. It gives you truth.