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Anywhere in the world

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If you could live anywhere in the world, where would you go?

If it were just up to me, and I got to choose (because I’m not sure my wife would agree), then these are the places I’d consider:

Barcelona: I don’t speak Spanish, and languages are not easy for me, but I loved the ‘livability’ of this city. It’s made for pedestrians, not cars, and I loved how the outdoor spaces were extensions of the indoor spaces. I was there in the winter and believe that if I went to visit in the summer I’d never want to leave.

The Caribbean: My Bajan roots run deep, and I’d love to live on an island. That said, I wonder if it would be too ‘small town’ for me? I haven’t spend much time there in the latter part of my life, and while there is a romanticized sense of appeal, I’m not convinced I’d want to live in the Caribbean as much as I’d like to visit more frequently.

Costa Rica: A favourite family holiday destination. Maybe that’s the appeal. Like the Caribbean, I don’t know if this is more of a holiday destination or a retirement destination, but everything about my trip there tells me that I want to spend more time there in the future.

Thailand: The people are so nice, and the country is beautiful. I enjoyed the Philippines as well, but the Philippines felt more like a holiday destination. Having lived in China, I don’t know if I’d go back there to live, although there are many more destinations in China to visit, yet Thailand has a feel more like ‘home’.

Australia: I’ve never been, but everything I hear about this wonderful country tells me that I could grow roots there.

Places I still want to explore: These aren’t places I necessarily want to live because I don’t know what I don’t know about them, but I really want to visit Italy, Portugal, Croatia and other Balkan countries, and Taiwan. There are also so many more places in the world that I want to visit: Countries in South America and Africa, India, Iceland, and many European countries are all on my wish list, but these again are holiday destinations for me until I actually visit them and can make a more informed decision.

I don’t know if any of these appeal to my wife, and the reality is that unless one or both of our daughters leave BC, Canada, it’s likely this will remain my wife and I’s home location. Still it’s nice to dream about possible places to live, and right now these are the places that have the most appeal to me… maybe I’ll revisit this in a few years, and if not a final destination, perhaps these can be long-term visit locations for my wife and I during retirement.

Where would you want to live? And why?

Rose coloured glasses

We’ve all heard the term, “It’s like seeing the world through rose coloured glasses”, but what does that mean? What is it like to see the world through a biased viewpoint that ‘clouds’ other views? Rose coloured glasses suggests a positive outlook, what happens when our ‘glasses’, our viewpoint, is biased in a negative way? What if our view prevents us from seeing things that can benefit us?

This is too hard!

I can’t.

Why do things like this always happen to me?

There is no way out.

These are gloomy statements that can sour our world view and limit our ability to see good possibilities… to view the world through rose coloured glasses, or for that matter, clear glasses.

What lenses do we choose to look through? For most of us the lenses aren’t clear, they don’t bring reality into focus. We carry biases that cloud our vision, our perspective. But we don’t walk around wearing those biases like a pair of coloured glasses on our faces.

Despite the fact that most ideas lie on a spectrum, most viewpoints seem to swing away from central perspectives to polarized views with thick coloured lenses to peer through.

What does this mean? It means that not only do we not share the same viewpoint as others, sometimes we don’t share the same world as others. We literally exist in world so different than someone with an opposing view, that we can’t see the same things.

Imagine a world where everything is either red or green, and you had to choose red or green coloured sunglasses. To the person wearing green glasses there would only be green items and dark/black objects. To the person wearing red glasses there would only be red items and dark/black objects. None of the items seen by these two people would look remotely the same to both of these people. None.

I fear that few people these days are seeing the world through rose coloured glasses, and that whatever the colour being chosen, it is too dark, there is less light coming through, less opportunity to see the world others different than you are seeing. Maybe my inability to see this is an issue of my own lenses being clouded… but I fear that we are building a world that pushes us towards darkened glasses and away from natural light that lets us see things as they really are.