Out of Place

I admit the following phenomenon may be an entirely endogenous, self-referential experience, but I feel at least somewhat guarded by the safety net of the assumption that is likely far more ubiquitous than I previously thought.  That phenomenon is the one of feeling out of place.  I don’t necessarily mean that one feels out of place in the sense that everyone else wore business attire to a function and you wore a bathing suit, or that you came prepared for a rock concert only to find out that it ended the night before and now the theatre is hosting a sing-along concert for Dora the Explorer and her friends.  I don’t mean feeling out of place in this sense.  Rather, I mean feeling like you are never ‘in place.’  That is, when you are at work, you can’t stop feeling a nagging sensation you should be home with your family; and when you finally get home to your family and experience less than the domestic bliss that you had been imagining, you are ready to retreat to a coffee shop or a weekend hike or, perhaps just back to work.  This constant and insatiable unsettledness about not just location, but also environment, is a writhing angst with many, I perceive.  We are very good at obscuring it.  Headphones and an electronic device are all it takes to escape.  This is not a tirade against iPods or headphones, of which I use both, but an invective against feeling the perpetual need to remove ourselves from our immediate surroundings on a perpetual basis.  This is not a phenomenon that can be combated with clever one-liners such as “be present,” but that may be a good start.  On that line of thinking, it may seem pedantic to say ‘wherever you go, there you are,’ but this, I believe, carries more significant weight than first blush appears.  Wherever you go, you likely don’t necessarily have to be somewhere else (exceptions granted), so you can be where you are instead - engaged.  If this entire idea and concept seems foreign, then know that I have merely been speaking of myself the whole time.