Normal is Plural

I always call somewhere home. The word arrives naturally, without decision. I say it and mean it and then later say it again about somewhere else and mean that too.

Home is fluid. I have known this for long enough that it no longer feels like a loss.

Normal is the same. We say it as though it were universal. But my normal in Hungary and my normal in London and my normal in Vietnam are not translations of each other. They are different languages entirely. You cannot look the word up in a dictionary. You have to live inside it for a while before it starts to make sense, and even then what makes sense to you will not make sense to the person standing next to you, even if you share a postcode, even if you share a bed.

Normal is plural. It always was. We just built infrastructure around one version of it and called that reality.

There is a paradox that arrives when you have lived in many places. You stop needing the fourteen toothpastes. Not because you become ascetic or superior about it but because you have seen people live well on two, on one, on whatever is available, and the abundance starts to look less like freedom and more like a question you have to answer every morning before you have even brushed your teeth.

Does having everything make you forget you already have enough.

The fear, in many places I have lived, is the habit rather than the reality. The infrastructure is already there — the healthcare, the stability, the food, the safety so embedded it has become invisible. And still the chasing continues. More money. More certainty. More. Not because the rain is actually falling but because the memory of rain, or the idea of rain, or someone else's rain, keeps the fear alive long after the umbrella is open.

I say this not from above it. I am inside it too. I have stood under the umbrella and felt cold anyway.

What living in many places gave me was not superiority over any of them. It was the ability to see each one from the outside while still being inside it. Medellín, Bangalore, Almaty alongside Paris, London, Tokyo. The logic of each place visible because you have seen the logic of another. Not better. Just multiple. The same way you can hold several languages and none of them cancels the others out.

How do we know what we know, and what invisible forces organise that knowing. How does a human being learn to think for themselves.

Not through the toothpastes. Through encounters. Through the book that finds you at the right moment. Through the conversation that unravels something you had been carrying without knowing its name. Through sitting with a question long enough that the question itself starts to change shape.

As Paul Zacharia understood it: the web catches the prey. The spider just eats what the web brings.

I wove the web. I built the conditions. The materials were privilege and time and the particular freedom of not being under survival pressure, which is not nothing, which is in fact everything, which is the thing most people do not say out loud when they talk about how they got here. Hungary gave me the melancholy and the precision. Vietnam gave me the warmth and the responsibility toward continuity. Britain gave me the permission structure, the intellectual confidence, the language the world reads in. And I — the consciousness sitting at the intersection of all three, belonging fully to none of them and therefore free to take from all of them — took those materials and built something that did not exist before.

The hunting is done by the geometry of the work. I just had to build it and trust it and let it catch what it was shaped to catch.

We exist in a constant state of ambiguity. Clarity and confusion arriving together, bliss and suffering sharing the same morning.

Change is the only constant. And if that is true, which it is, which every version of normal in every city I have called home has confirmed, then the only intelligent response is to welcome it. Not to grip. Not to build higher walls around whichever version of normal you happen to be standing in. To trust the motion.

Normal is plural. Home is fluid. Impermanence is not a problem to be solved. It is the condition of everything, including the self that keeps arriving somewhere new and calling it home.

And the self means it every time.