There's No Place Like Home, So Where's My Place?

Is it time for you to pack up and move on, to seek greener pastures, to move to a better place where you’re not only appreciated but your luck is better? Where you’ll meet new people and new people will meet and be intrigued by you? A place where you can relate your story and, unbelievably, these strangers listen to you? Yes, Ralph Waldo Emerson did say, and rightly so, “It is a luxury to be heard.”

In about thirty seconds of reading time I’m going to write for you one of my favorite, all-time quotes. It’s from The Art of Worldly Wisdom and written by a Spanish Jesuit priest named Balthasar Gracian who was born in 1601, so what you’re about to read was written almost 400 years ago.

Gracian observes that “Some stand high in the favor of princes and potentates without knowing why or wherefore, except that good luck itself has granted them favor on easy terms, merely requiring them to aid it with a little exertion.”

In other words, things are easier in some locations than they are in others. Move to certain areas, do everything right, and for inexplicable reasons you either fail or everything is a challenge. Move to another location where you’re more favorably received, make a lot of mistakes and still you succeed and rather easily. Captain Picard, in one Star Trek episode, told Data, “Sometimes you can do all the right things and still fail.” That’s been my experience when I lived where clearly I didn’t belong yet how I tried and it’s as if every door that was open slammed just as I approached.

To continue what Gracian wrote in The Art of Worldly Wisdom: “Others find favor with the wise. One man is better received by one nation than by another, or is more welcome in one city than another. He finds more luck in one office or position than another, and all this though his qualifications are equal or even identical. Luck shuffles the cards how and when she will. Let each man know his luck as well as his talents, for on this depends whether he loses or wins. Follow your guiding star and help it without mistaking any other for it, for that would be to miss the North through its neighbor, the polestar, calls us to it with a voice of thunder.”

You’re in the wrong place at the wrong time of your life and you know it. For myself this struggle occurred during the nearly ten years I spent in a Texas city only because the job I had was the only one I was offered during that ten year period, even though I sent out numerous resumes. Finally, when I moved, my luck changed. During the time I lived in this particular city, I felt as though I had to daily provide my own inner cabin pressure just to have the energy to get through another day.

One issue I had to deal with during those years was the question of “Why am I not getting job offers?” I was aware that Krishnamurti had written, “So to discover [what you love to do] there must be no fear of surviving,” and at that time I didn’t have the faith and confidence in my future that I thankfully do now.

I, also, wanted more nutritious objects of attention and I wasn’t getting them there. The British novelist Colin Wilson pointed out that to remain psychologically healthy we need “streams of newness flowing into our lives.” Well, this place wasn’t the best place to live for streams of newness. I was reminded of the famous author who wrote that he did not like the city in which he lived because, after several years there, “I no longer feel myself to be interesting.”

Add to all this the climate of this Texas city, if I dare call the heat and humidity a climate. The heat felt like I was living inside an oven for about six months of each year. Who feels great when the temperature’s close to 110 day after endless day? The brain boiled.

My spirit moved away about three years before my body had the courage to finally end this saga, and I did find I was better received in the city I finally located to and as for the good fortune I was seeking, I discovered what Joseph Campbell wrote was true: “Your whole physical system knows that this is the way to be alive in this world and the way to give the very best that you have to offer. There is a track just waiting there for each of us, and once on it, doors will open that were not open before and would not open for anyone else.” I took the leap and, sure enough, a safety net appeared rather quickly.

I was later to discover that every city, every place, every location in the world has its own thought vibration. “Everything from a stone to a human being,” Prentice Mulford wrote in Thoughts Are Things, “sends out to you, as you look upon it, a certain amount of force, affecting you beneficially or injuriously according to the quality of life or animation it possesses.”

“The average thought-atmosphere of a community is the composite thoughts of the people composing that community,”Yogi Ramacharaka writes in Fourteen Lessons in Yogi Philosophy and written in 1904. “…this thought-atmosphere of a village, town, city, or nation is the composite thought of those dwelling in it or who have previously dwelt there. Strangers coming into the community feel the changed atmosphere about it, and unless they find it in harmony with their own mental character, they feel uncomfortable and desire to leave the place. If one…remains long in a place, he is most likely to be influenced by the prevailing thought-atmosphere, and in spite of himself a change begins to be manifest in him and he sinks or rises to the level of the prevailing thought.”

Each place, Ramacharaka says, has its own “spirit” that you can feel upon arriving, just as dwellings, business-places, businesses “take on the predominant thought of those inhabiting them or who have dwelt in them. Some places are notoriously unlucky…,” and it requires a person of enormous will to rise above the level of that area’s prevailing thoughts. These thought-forms which have congealed over the years and created the atmosphere of a place and the feelings you feel are, Ramacharaka notes, “…thoughts possessing such vitality that they become almost like living forces,” and they influence our moods. I’ve often described thought forms as being like “handkerchiefs playing tag in the wind.”

So maybe it’s time for a new lease on life, a change of pace, and a beginning in a place that fosters and nourishes your creativity, supports you, and appreciates you as much as you appreciate it. Only you know your life situation. “The average thought-atmosphere of a community is the composite thoughts of the people composing that community,” Ramacharaka writes. Some thought-forms travel away but most remain “…in the same way a fire in a stove may be extinguished, and yet the heat will remain in the room for a long time afterward.”

To quote Leonardo da Vinci, “…so any object placed in the luminous atmosphere,” like the our prevailing thoughts and moods which others pick up on, “diffuses itself in circles and fills the surrounding air with infinite images of itself.” In other words, we may find that what we encounter when we arrive at our new place is in many respects a mirror image of who we are. Whoops!

I can’t tell you what the next move in your life should be, what location you should look at based on what Gracian called “your guiding star,” but when you do take this next step in your life I’d research places where, to quote Joseph Campbell again, you can passionately pursue your highest enthusiasms which is what he meant when he said “Follow your bliss.” Follow your bliss, Campbell observed, “and you will always have your bliss money or not.” “Bliss is great,” I can hear my dad saying inside my head, “but money to pay your bills and enjoy some of life’s pleasures is nothing to sneeze at.” Dad, of course, would be right.

Even if you find the best place for you to live in this world and you’ve decided to, as the opening song to the old Rawhide TV series said, ‘Head ‘em up and move ‘em out,” remember — as I’ve discovered — that no matter where you go you’re taking your thought forms with you and, to quote Paul Chivington in Seeing Through Your Illusions,” you’ll discover that “When you have chosen a particular perspective on life, the universe will rush in to greet you from that point of view,” as will your new place you’ve chosen to call home.