Wednesday, January 03, 2007


I am at home and I want to talk about mobility, the modern term for nomadism. I mean personal mobility, the one that takes a creature of habit and moves it to the other side of the world. I have often wondered as to why I find it so easy to escape Greece, to leave friends and family behind, and seek life elsewhere. the simple explanation that there is no job for me in Greece is certainly not adequate. If I had tried, there would have been something there for me. I did not try, which means that there is an appeal to life abroad for me that makes living away from the fatherland easier. The question that arises, however, is not whether it is I who finds it easier to leave, but rather others who find it more difficult. What makes people who are not happy in Greece so reluctant to leave? The person I am addressing here will recognise the self as the addressee of this question. I do not buy the argument about difficulties in moving, about habits that are hard to break. Why should we be reluctant to move when motion is all that can keep us alive? Routine is powerful, yet routine can be broken. I vote for mobility, I know it to be possible, it just takes organizing skills and a decision. That is the beauty of our globalized mess, the bourgeois are mobile, the bourgeois are the new nomads.

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