There's an interesting trend that I've noticed through my travels on Facebook... Almost all the people I went to school with now live around the world, with a small percentage still living local (like me) :-) I'm not sure if it's something new for our generation or if it's just more noticeable due to social media. You see, with our parents and grandparents, the chances were that when they left school or college or perhaps left a company where they worked, they would have lost touch with each other or at least, most of them would have. Some - close friends - would have stayed in touch through potentially ever decreasing quantities of letters and cards or perhaps not. Things are a little different with our generation... and it's changing things for the generations above us too!
Let us examine social media like Facebook and Twitter, even MySpace. They allow us to grab glimpses into the lives of people that we knew. Sometimes these glimpses are as brief as the flashes you'd get between passing train carriages, offering us an incomplete image of the person on the other side. Other times, people are too happy to park us outside their front window and share absolutely everything with us. Either way, we are able to search for names from our past and peep in on them at random. Perhaps we go along "adding" people to our Facebook friends list - often forgetting that there are people on there that we wouldn't want privy to our secrets and day-to-day lives. It also makes it glaringly apparent that many of our "friends" have (with apologies) "Boldly Gone Where Many Have Gone Before".
Some left when we were still at school, boldly carving out new lives for themselves after their parents whims have dragged them around the world. Others couldn't wait for that last Matric exam before they were throwing darts at a map. A few chose to Au pair or study briefly overseas, only to fall in love - with either a person or the country or simply the lifestyle. At any rate, seeing "UK", "Canada", "Switzerland", "Mexico", "Brazil", etc, etc as their "home cities" certainly brings home to those of us back here, that we're still here. The question is this... were we left behind or did we choose to stay?
I can only speak for myself... and I chose to stay. I love my friends, my home, my family and the environment in which I find myself. Don't get me wrong, I would be happy to live overseas, but I would never do it without my family around me. Do I feel as if I've missed out? No. I made a choice to live the life I live and although I loved the year I spent overseas (yes, I did it too... 6 months with family there too and 6 months alone), I am loving the experiences I've had in my own back yard. So, no, I don't feel as if I've missed out. Sometimes though, I wonder what it must be like to live their lives. Like getting to try on a character in a movie :-) But it never feels real. I live in Cape Town and I love this town. There isn't anything better than the diversity of being able to get from the beach to the farmlands in under an hour or disappear into the mountains for a healthy retreat. This city is a vacation destination of note, but far more than that, it's my home. The place where my blood moves at the right speed and the very dust motes in the air are familiar.
And if I ever feel as if I need to do something different? No problem, I can experience the world vicariously through the talented and wonderful eyes of my Facebook friends. It's something that older generations are embracing each day and although the world continues to shrink second by second, it's now totally at our feet!
Until next time...
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