Life is always elsewhere

A day in the life of anybody in any city of any country in the world must not be very dissimilar from that of mine. You wake up early in the morning as I do, breakfast, shower, and get dressed (the order may vary at times) and set off for work. You labor all day (most of the time there is a purpose to it, especially teaching and learning and creating and being intellectually stimulated…some of the benefits of being an academic) and then go home to continue your habitual routine – dinner, family, friends, television, reading, making love, arguing, sleeping – though it too varies a lot…and the making love part is mostly poetic embellishment. When I have some time for myself I realize that another day or days or week or weeks or month or months have gone by and I attempt to take stock of what has come to pass. I am an expatriate having moved from Athens to Istanbul a little over three years ago….from one historic and beautiful city to another. Yet, as I ponder my humdrum routine…a day in the life of Dimitri…I sadly come to recognize that it so overwhelms me that I don’t enjoy the sounds and sights and smells of Istanbul as much as I would want to. I came here to escape the sinking sensation of Athens and to nurture the need to stimulate myself with new experiences and I do what I used to do….a life structured around work. As a result, when I periodically hear the call of the muezzin or focus on the language being spoken around me, it suddenly dawns on me that I am elsewhere, in what should ideally be an exotic environment….but it is not…a day in the life of Dimitri in Istanbul is the same as a day in the life of Dimitri in Athens or a day in the life of Dimitri in London…the only marked and tangible difference is the food when I have lunch at or around my work place and dinner whenever I go out. The tastes still surprise me even though they are similar to those found in Greek cuisine. I find myself comparing and contrasting and sometimes even experimenting in the comfort of my kitchen to reproduce them (without much success).

As in Solzhenitsyn’s classic portrayal of A Day in the Life of Ivan Desinovich, the routine of the day is my gulag with its repetitive cycles and the intermittent novel experiences interspersed in it. Life is always elsewhere yet I am living it day in, day out. “Life is like weeds,” Kundera writes in Life is Elsewhere…like weeds, the routine grows on you and you keep on living…