If You CouldLive Anywhere...Where Would You Want To Live?

I had a student some years ago mention that as soon as she graduated high school she was getting as far from her hometown as possible. She wanted to escape the boredom of a small town in North Carolina. Head out to the big city. This comment came after the students had asked me a bit about where I was from. I find this question to be quite difficult to answer. If I could live anywhere in the world where would I want to be? I’ve lived enough places to find this question difficult. I can remember being quite bored in all of the places I have lived. I can remember being most definitely unhappy. You can’t live everywhere. And all places have their unique delights what makes life most enjoyable most satisfying is found in relationships. I don’t just mean personal relationships though these certainly are among the most significant of our relationships, but the way we relate to the place in which we live. Our work, our community involvement, our friendships, our family, our hobbies, our relationships shape life far more definitively than the weather and the view. This reality confronts us with a further challenge. We are not entirely in control of these relationships. We do not have the ability to simply construct them in the way we can choose to move somewhere. This is where the difficulty in this question rests at least for me. Where would I choose to live? I don’t find the question helpful because such choice points one after a disconnection from the very relationships that make life most satisfying.