Good Better Best : A Sense of the Familiar

Often times, all it takes is a simple hat trick to help push you over the edge of happiness.  Just a few days back, one of my newly acquired girlfriends and I hit the city.  In fact, we have taken a total of three trips into the city in less than a week!  With our expert navigators unavailable, we accomplished what I like to call an RGB moment.  This is when everything that has come before suddenly shifts from black & white into a full color life!

I can’t speak for my girlfriend, but I’m sure she would agree, we have to acknowledge the people who made this leap possible.  The community of long timers in my fishing village offered friendship, which led to car rides, which allowed for conversation, deepening the friendship, and increasing the value of the experience.  In the periphery, I’m taking in the sights, the connections between interchanges, and unconsciously untangling the overwhelming frayed edges of a city with a population of 970,377 people!   

Here we are, in our cars without a safety net, and we manage!  In fact, we manage so well that by the end of the second trip we each are hitting the kind of comfort zone that shouts familiarity!  Our friendship has gone from “You are so Funny” to “I love you SOOOO MUCH”, with mascara streaming down our faces.  Okay, we don’t wear mascara, yet I believe you can close your eyes and feel the magnitude of the moment.  The intensity of being so relaxed that you own this most perfect of comfortable rides.   This is a very young accomplishment.   Our joy looks like the face of a young child that has mastered running across gravel without a spill!

Relaxed is a condition we all seek.  After you have figured out necessities, like how to refill your propane tank or where to buy more bottled water, after you have nearly been arrested during a traffic violation or had to pay a police officer a bribe, and after you have survived the rumor mill and the one person who hates you because you couldn’t remember their name after meeting 100 other new people; having a superior and perfect moment of relaxed comfort erases every difficult moment of the transition.  You know you have moved positions on the chess board.  You have emerged from the cocoon of easily identified foreign person to successful expatriate!  

Hacks That Help

• Hitchhiking with strangers:    We all grew up with stranger danger messages in one form or another.  Life isn’t lived without taking risk.  This was particularly hard for me as I’m an introvert.  The idea of being locked in a car with a stranger for hours can push me towards neurosis.   The gentle push I gave myself was well worth the risk.

• Move away from the revolving door, and fast:   Initially you can’t help feeling a bit out of control.  One of the best and most obvious hat tricks given to me was that the name of the various denominations is printed on the money.  Simplicity!
• Hack the system:  Pretty soon you realize that there really is an order governing the chaos of your new universe.   It’s been referred to as chaortic; the merging of chaos and order is universal.   You know when a waiter is asking you for your meal order!  You participated in this interaction hundreds of times over the course of your life.  If you get stuck, use the pointer on your right hand!  

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