Less than a month away from a looming departure to a new life in Asia, and my thoughts linger heavily over the hard reality of leaving this lakefront I call home. Chicago isn’t just a place for some of us, it’s a state of mind and being, an endless love affair with an unpredictable beast of a city that will shade all the subtle places in your soul if you let it. This place defines me. I wanted it to. I latched onto the rich lineages of this town with a vengeance, and learned my craft studying the legacy of those who came before. I came looking for the blues and got swept up in a crew of DJs so sick their beats are born into the world as contraband. Once you’ve really tapped into the rich throbbing vein of Chicago’s sound, and drunk from its many tributaries, there’s no escaping its sway on your life. You become part of a heritage that’s been passed down through generations, of blues refined and plugged in and beats distilled and tweaked into something fierce enough to keep you warm through vicious wintry nights. I may not choose to live here anymore, but this is not the kind of city you can really leave behind. The sound follows you…if you let it…
This is one of the reasons we’ve chosen to leave. Becky and I came here as musicians…the music brought us here, provided us with jobs and gigs, sustained us through a dozen years of hard work and toil, and ultimately it led us to find each other on parallel journeys, fingering the same chords and pounding complementary rhythms. Now it’s opened up a doorway for us across the world in Thailand, and so we go where the sound takes us, to ply our wares and beats for new strangers soon to be friends.
But in all honesty, that simplifies and romanticizes the reasons why we’re leaving. Why leave a city this good? Why leave our great jobs? Why put so much distance between us and the friends we’re so blessed to know and love? You don’t leave your family behind on a whim, nor do you walk away from entire communities without considering the folly of what you might be doing. We are leaving our home, where we have roots and careers and infinite love, for an adventure into the great unknown of Southeast Asia. Perhaps a deeper explanation is in order…
A couple weeks ago I was having dinner with Becky and we were talking about this move, and all the emotions it’s dredging up, and about how so many people we know are experiencing similar profound transitions. Not a lot of our friends are moving, but a whole slew of them are having their first kids and getting hitched and settling into parenthood and property ownership and new stages of their careers. It’s a spectacle to behold, really, this process of adjusting into adulthood, and I found myself telling Becky it scares the bejesus out of me. Domesticity may be inevitable, but we do have a choice of how it manifests. All our lives are on trajectories, and as we age the infinite array of possible futures starts to narrow down. The more you root down in one place, the more likely certain options are to unfold. This is why a new horizon and new challenges sound so appealing. We’re not ready just yet to settle into our lives here, into a mortgage, a family, predictable retirement worries, and the standard formulas for middle aged chitown hipsterdom that would be so easy to embrace. We want something else.
What it is we do want? Well, we want to travel. We tasted enough of the world to have the hunger in us for far horizons, and wanderlust is both a gift and an affliction that spurs people on to increasingly stranger quests for novelty. We dream of a place where the sun comes down strong the whole year round, where the local cuisine is infused with spices that caress and burn the tongue, and where time moves at a leisurely meandering pace. We want to explore, and to reboot and redefine ourselves, seeking out new levels of awareness and understanding amongst new circles of people. Is that so hard to understand?
Becky and I both came to Chicago as different people, innocent in so many ways, untested and raw, and the city broke us down and rebuilt us in its image. We lost parts of ourselves here, and learned who we were in the process. It took us a dozen years of seeking and wandering to find each other, and now that we’ve joined our lives together, we want to remake our maps and plans and start fresh in a different place and see what a new context will do for our love and lives. Everyone deserves a clean slate every now and then, right? F.Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote that “there are no second acts in American lives.” Well, that might have been true a century ago, but it’s not true for us, beholding a far different future. There are many acts available to those of us not hemmed in by borders, who teach across tribes, and who are tapped into the mysteries of sound and rhythm… Those second acts just need to be sought out....
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