It's a wednesday, I should be working on a presentation, or editing an essay, or researching another one to compensate for my lack of productivity this weekend but instead i'm sitting in a coffee shop listining to Australian alternative rock writing this instead.
When you do a degree in international studies and history you read a lot about ethnic groups/ minority groups/ tribalism.... the list goes on. Having spent the past few days at the beach, watching the ocean's tide come in and out, your mind starts to wonder. This time my mind wondered to this thought, with the world becoming increasingly interconnected, increasingly globalized, and interracial marriages becoming common, the world has given birth to a new ethnic group that is growing rapidly; The Transient Children of the World.
The Transient Children of the World, are a group of children who may be born in once country but have moved around a lot, have adventurous parents, have their lives in more than once place and don't really have a place to call home, they sort of do but not really.
For some of them, home is what ever their passport says, some of them, its where they spent the crucial years of child hood development. Although, some have a home, some don't have a home and some have many homes. Depends on the child really.
Transient Children tend to follow the same religion, travelling. They choose to practice this religion not by reading lonely planet guides or watching travel shows but by focusing their life around ways they can maximize travel, wether its by studying abroad, working abroad, or trying to plan what they want to do with their life around jobs that will take them abroad.
Transient Children of the World tend to be an very inclusive bunch of people for the most part who embrace all cultures and walks of life. In General, they are incredibly open minded, although there are some who are closed minded.
There are no chiefs or leaders of of the Transient Children of the World. They are each their own leader, guided by the planet and the random locations they find on google maps that they decide they want to explore.
Each Child has a specific bias to certain areas they wish to explore, wether it's deserts, oceans, lake. For me, it's island. I haven't got any clue why, but every time I discover a random island on google maps/ images it becomes on my list of never ending places to explore.
I am a Transient Child of the World. My passport(s) say Manchester is home, but I have no connection to the city. I grew up in a commuter town mixed with posh people and chav's. I lived in the middle of nowhere British Columbia... a place that is pretty similar to what pergatory is ( to my family reading this please don't kill me). I'm now in Vancouver, its a semi-home but doesn't really feel like a home.
The closest feeling I get to home is passing through the EU nationals line up at Heathrow but I can't really pitch a tent at passport control and live off of airport food for my rest life. Something tells me that British Border Control wouldn't be to happy about that.... or Heathrow Airport for that matter.
So, I'm putting my hand on the Lonely Planet's, "The Travel Book", swearing my loyalty to being a Transient Child of the World, to keep exploring, keep learning and keep meeting cool people.
Who knows, maybe I'll find a home, maybe all Transient Children of the World will find a home eventually. In the mean time however, in the words of Hans Chirstian Andersen," To travel is to live" and my self nor any other Transient Children of the World are planning on kicking the bucket for at least another forty five years.
