The Curse of Comfort

My home, as partly seen from Waverton.

I've been thinking lately about how much I want to travel and how I want to see (and more richly, experience) other places. But I think too about how much similarly people in other countries must view Australia - on this note I was talking to my brother when I saw him on the weekend (he who has been to pretty much all of Europe) and how we share that desire to be somewhere, anywhere else but here. He was the one that raised the point: "Yeah, Ror, but those Londoners or Europeans might see exactly the same about Australia, and how extraordinary we are."

The thing is, these things are relative. The grass is always greener on the other side (*of the world). I've been thinking about Tokyo and Kyoto; and Berlin and Paris and Seoul.
I think too about how Sydney seems uninteresting and ordinary. I've come to see that this is part of the process of how we come to form our perception of "home".

In marketing recently I've learnt a bit about the sensory process and how stimulus salience and exposure is important. Basically, the process of perception goes like this. We are exposed to a stimuli; we pay attention to it because it is salient; we interpret it; and then we integrate that into our perception and experience of the world. Basically, there's the net result in there that the more exposure we have to a given stimuli, or the more repeated or "noisy" that stimuli is, the more we come to perceive that as less important or powerful.

So, to call somewhere home is to, I guess, have experienced the stimuli so much it is all at once comfortable, it is noisy, it is unimportant. This stimuli could be the sight of open blue skies for 3 weeks straight, for the glint of the vista of endless glass that is Sydney Harbour, for a perfect temperate autumn day. It could be knowing your suburb so intimately so that you can walk home blind. It could be knowing the way the wind blows in city streets. It could be knowing the best place to buy coffee, or a croissant, or the way the street feels on a Sunday. However the sting of comfort is boredom. Without salience, these stimuli aren't impactful, they aren't knocking at the doors of your consciousness, of your sensory experiences.  As The Thrills sing, "the curse of comfort has plagued your artistic life".

That's why I can walk around Ikebukuro, or Kurama, or Gion, and respectively be buffeted by a constant stream of humanity; see millions of leaves of subtle shades foresting the mountains; walk amongst the miyachi and imagine myself centuries years back in time - and all the time be captivated. Similarly I could walk around Copenhagen, or Berlin, or Paris and all these would be exciting, captivating and each day would go into my memory bank inconceivably more powerful than the day I went to uni or the day I went to the city to buy a CD.  There's simple psychological reasons why we feel the way we do about the places we encounter, and why we can remember such strong details of those places we hold close to our heart.

I guess these powerful feelings for the unfamiliar overweigh the familiar stimuli from the world that are just as beautiful and captivating.

With the conversation that I had with my brother, my perception has changed so slightly. Walking around North Sydney, Kirribilli, Waverton and those surrounding areas of a warm winter afternoon too has hit me harder than I thought they would. My extended family asking me why I liked Sydney and how it was better than Brisbane; and particularly a short walk around Ashgrove and a drive through Red Hill opened my eyes a bit to things that can lie under our attention if we don't seek them. I guess I hope I can see lots of Sydney soon that is new to me, that is not yet familiar, mundane, home. I know Sydney has places hidden still to me.

I do not think I'll ever not want to travel, at least at worst, periodically. But we can't do this constantly, not unless we are dealt a hand by fate that is so complimentary! So on that note, I hope to at minimum, drain a constant appreciation for that place I have no choice to know as home as best I can. The grass is greenest wherever watered and fed by unfamiliarity. We can still grow a pretty nice patch in our own backyard, though.