By Kent Bruyneel
It’s easier to come and go when you are alone. Even easier if all you have fits into boxes, and you don’t quite know who you are.
This was my second major move: loaded up my car and drove like an escaped convict from Vancouver to Saskatoon. My first time was not as simple but even more impulsive: across the country, from Vancouver to university in Charlottetown. But because I was alone and not at all sure of myself, the first two times the excitement of leaving trumped any worry about arriving. In both cases, I decided to go without truly considering the ramifications. That is what it is to be young: to use boldness and bravado to mask insecurity. But at any age, if you are unhappy, you can, by some measure, start over by going to a new place. My first big going was a starting over.
I was 22. I had heard what it was like to go away to college, live in a dorm and make lifelong friends (I had seen The Big Chill). But the isolation hit me as I crossed the Northumberland Strait: I was alone on an island, if not myself an island.
This was the point of moving so far away. I resolved that I was going to make myself into the person I could never be in my hometown. College was easy because we all go there for the same reason: to become.
Coming and going is about that, too – finding a sense of yourself by getting away from all the places and people, those that love you and don’t, who keep you the same. By the time the ferry docked in P.E.I., I decided that childhood would end here.
Going to Saskatoon was different still. I had finished graduate school back in Vancouver and needed to get out of town. A friend told me about an opportunity in the Prairies. I informed the hiring committee I was prepared to move without delay from Vancouver to Saskatoon.
I was offered the editorship of Grain. I accepted the contract so fast we never actually discussed the terms; I accepted before I considered what it would be like to live in Saskatchewan, a place I had only driven through, and fast.
I had an idea of who I was that was not restricted by geography or company, but I was still struggling with who I wanted to be, like everyone else I knew. Jack Kerouac called this time the beat evil days of your late 20s. It’s a time where most of your naivety is gone, but not all your idealism. I was 31.
Coming to Edmonton also happened fast, but it was not like the other times. I sent an email to a magazine that was looking for an editor; I was certain I would hear that the job was taken. I was happy where I was, and who I was. I had just finished my tenure at Grain. I had recently become engaged. The world was full of blissful occupation. But later that evening I heard from the publisher herself: the position was still open.
What are plans anyway? What are they but vague ideas we have of ourselves? For some of us it is clear: attach yourself to a profession like a stamp that addresses the envelope of your existence for the outside world. I am an accountant, one says. An editor, says another.
These are jobs though, not identities; I now understand the difference. I was not going to find myself, this time. Just work.
There would be no more capricious moves. I carefully read the contract. I am part of a relationship; and though that might slightly restrict my ability to move, it buttresses the rest of my existence. All the things I want are not only possible; I can see a way to get them. Commitment has brought freedom and a keener sense of self. I am 37.
You might have guessed this part: I accepted the editorship of unlimited. This time it took a fully loaded trailer and two carloads to pack, but we labelled all our stuff and came to Edmonton.
Coming to a new city is like reading a great story for the first time.
In both, you can inhabit a new identity. In a new city, or in a new book, you can untangle what Al Purdy called the “strange and lonely” places of yourself. Be proud of them; give them names that make them part of who you are and how you identify; so that what was weakness is now idiosyncrasy. Where once you were trapped, in a new place or in the midst of a narrative, you can find salvation. Coming and going is the process of discovering who you are and who you could be.
This brings me back to Kerouac, who said that the noble thing his beat generation could do was move. Maybe the millennial generation can find nobility and its identity in coming and going, too. Like finishing that story, when you come and go, you acquire new elements of yourself, and after time and practice, you can enlist them in the building of who you want to be. Wherever you are. U
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