Where would you choose to spend your life?

Where I am. Wherever life takes me.

I tried to move to the west coast (Vancouver) when I was 20 or so. Didn't work out for various reasons (my girlfriend was homesick and I didn't want to stay 'alone'; neither of us had a job yet; family opposition). Planned to move to the Okanagan (interior BC) a couple of years later when my sister got a teaching job there, but by the time she was ready to leave I had met someone special… The thing is, if I had moved either of those times I would have missed meeting the man. (Gasp!) Of course, I would have also missed him dying several years later…

Years later I 'followed the money' to booming Alberta (Calgary, then Edmonton). In Edmonton, I decided to go back to school. After my masters, I took the lure of a doctoral fellowship to Victoria. I'm done with my studies now but here I still am—not in Vancouver where I thought I wanted to live all those years ago, but on the Island. Even better. Feels like home.

Here's the thing, though: everywhere I have ever lived (except perhaps the town I grew up in) felt like home while I lived there. This did not mean that life went smoothly for me—far from it. I may have been at home in terms of the physical places I lived, but I wasn't at peace, not in the inner-self way. Here in Victoria, at last, I have grown to feel at home with myself. And I have come to see that everything that happened in my life, I chose, and chose, and chose—even when I didn't think I was choosing.

Is this my home for the rest of my life? God knows—or not. Personally, I don't think it's that important where my physical home is; what's important is that my heart and I are in the same place, that I'm not longing to be somewhere I'm not, that I'm not afraid to follow where my heart wants to take me. "Whither thou goest I will go," said Ruth in the Bible to her mother-in-law Naomi. I'm not Ruth for nothing. Only I'm not saying those words to someone outside of myself; I'm saying them to my heart.