Separate and separated

I have written before about how I want to break through my resistance to anything resembling change, and how I feel my life plan of travelling is the perfect opportunity to do that.  Sometimes I believe this completely, and sometimes I wonder if I am lying to myself.

Will exposure to an entirely fluid and constantly moving world force me to face change head on until I become an entirely flexible yet involved person, or does it actually give me the perfect excuse to never quite connect sufficiently for any change to ever be significant?  Maybe my craving for the feeling of constant motion, of transience, of travel is not based in a desire to experience more, but from a desire to excuse myself from really experiencing anything at all?

Even in England, I often find myself on the periphery of experience.  In groups of people, I am almost always the quiet one.  Even when alone with someone, I am rarely the one who leads the conversation.  Even when entirely alone, I often feel detached to the point of numbness.  Of course, it is all an illusion, a feeling.  I am unavoidably embodied within myself, my culture and this world, I am as much a part of it as any other.  But this is what I know, and not what I feel.

And If I feel like this here, in my home culture, my home country, my home town, how easy will it be for me to remain on the periphery in a country which is not my own?  If I feel like this when surrounded my people who understand my language, my behaviours and have so much in common with me, how easy will it be for me to never deeply interact with those less similar to me?

How easy, and yet how sad.  Always present, yet never connected.  Seeing the wonders of this world, but always from the sidelines.  Going everywhere, belonging nowhere.  A passive observer, nothing more.

Not belonging cannot be the excuse I hide behind for not trying.  And yet it is a pattern which repeats over and over.   I don’t want that to be my life.