The diary of almost everything

Last weekend I spent a few days with family in Maastricht, and every single time I go there I’m reminded how strange it is that one country can feel like two completely different places. Somewhere around Eindhoven my brain starts insisting that I’m practically abroad, simply because there are hills, people speak with a different accent and sitting on a terrace somehow feels more like being on holiday than it does at home. I know it’s irrational, but I’ve stopped arguing with it.

Like clockwork, the conversation eventually turned to one of those wonderfully unrealistic ideas that only sound sensible after good food and a glass of wine.

“You should just move here.”

For a few minutes it seemed like an excellent plan. We could find a beautiful old house, split it in two, drink coffee together whenever we felt like it and live happily ever after. My imagination had already decorated the living room before my practical side quietly interrupted to ask a few awkward questions.

What exactly was I planning to do for work?
Would I really think nothing of driving two and a half hours just to have coffee with my friends?
And, perhaps most importantly, would my two Sphynx cats appreciate becoming honorary Limburgers?
By the time I was halfway home, the fantasy had politely packed its bags.

The funny thing is that I don’t actually want to leave because I’m unhappy. Quite the opposite. My life is stable, I enjoy my work, I have wonderful friends, I have a home that is and feels like mine and, despite the occasional disagreement over who owns the sofa, my cats seem perfectly content as well. If someone asked me whether I’m happy, the answer would be yes without hesitation.

And yet, every now and then, a tiny voice appears out of nowhere and whispers that my world has become rather small.

Not my life. Just… my world.

I’ve lived in the same town for my entire life. I know which supermarket has the shortest queues, which roads to avoid when it’s raining because they’ll somehow be under construction again, and which café I’ll probably run into someone I know. There is something deeply comforting about that familiarity, although comfort has a sneaky habit of turning into routine before you even notice it’s happening.

For a while I genuinely believed the answer must be moving somewhere bigger. Perhaps I’d be happier in The Hague, or Rotterdam, or somewhere that constantly reminds you there are millions of lives unfolding alongside your own. Then I realised something rather inconvenient.

If I moved tomorrow, I’d eventually learn those streets as well. I’d discover my favourite bakery, complain about the traffic as passionately as the locals do, recognise familiar faces in the supermarket and slowly build exactly the same sense of routine I’d been trying to escape in the first place. It suddenly occurred to me that routine isn’t attached to a postcode. It simply follows us around, patiently waiting for us to unpack the moving boxes.

Maybe that’s why a weekend away feels so refreshing.

Not because you’ve become a different person, but because your attention wakes up again. You notice buildings you’d never seen before, conversations you wouldn’t normally overhear, little cafés that make you wonder why every city doesn’t have one exactly like that, and for a couple of days your world quietly expands without asking you to change your entire life.

Driving home, I realised something else.
Every single time I return, I experience exactly the same contradiction. Part of me feels relieved the moment I recognise the familiar roads leading home, while another part immediately wonders whether life isn’t supposed to be bigger than this.

Perhaps that’s the wrong question.

Maybe the better question is whether I’m making my world big enough, regardless of where I happen to live.

Because moving house isn’t the only way to shake things up.

Sometimes it’s saying yes to the invitation you’d normally decline, taking the train to a city you’ve never really explored, signing up for something that makes you slightly nervous, reading a book that challenges your thinking or simply allowing yourself to become curious again instead of letting routine make all the decisions for you.

I’ve started wondering whether that’s what people are really searching for when they dream about moving somewhere else. Maybe it isn’t another city they’re longing for at all. Maybe they’re hoping a different place will quietly hand them a different version of themselves.

I’m no longer convinced it works that way.

I think the most interesting version of ourselves can probably be found exactly where we already are, provided we keep giving ourselves reasons to look up, wander off every now and then and remember that the world has always been much bigger than the little circle we accidentally create around our daily lives.

And if I still find myself looking at houses in Maastricht from time to time…
Well, I suppose there’s no harm in letting the fantasy visit every now and then.
After all, it’s only a two-and-a-half-hour drive.

-Sophie Quinn