Linda and I renewed our driver licenses yesterday and it got me to thinking about the concepts of identity and geography. It is kind of odd to think that we have called the state of Maine home for some six years now, longer than we have lived anywhere but Florida, where we spent the vast majority of our married lives. All of which caused me to reflect upon what it is about our adopted home state that resonates with us so.
One major appeal is the natural beauty of the place, as pictured in my photo of Bass Harbor above. Another draw for me is the sense of remoteness here and our removal from the hustle and bustle of contemporary life in other popular places we lived such as Nashville and Orlando. And you can visit The Way Life Should Be for some more of my thoughts about our move to Maine.
Living in such a place is admittedly not for everyone but in the “viral age” we live I reckon we are about as happily ensconced as anyone else I can think of so I would not trade places with anyone. And a book I recently read called We Took to the Woods by Louise Dickinson Rich echoes much the same sentiment: “Why did we come to live here in the first place? We thought it was because we liked the woods, because we wanted to find a simple, leisurely way of life,” wrote Dickinson.
“Now, looking back, I think that we were unconsciously seeking to find a lost sense of our own identity,” she continued. “Certainly I am more at home in this world that we have created than ever I was in that vast and confusing maelstrom that we call civilization…Here I dare to be myself…I don’t see why I should ever care again what people think of me.” And I could not agree more. As Dickinson also wrote, “Discontent is only the fear of missing something. Content is the knowledge that you aren’t missing a thing worthwhile.”
Finally, I got the title of this post from another book I read a while ago titled How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency by Akiko Busch. My takeaway from it is that there is something to be said for eschewing platforms like social media that so often skew one’s sense of identity. To that end, I rarely check my LinkedIn profile, I am totally inactive on Twitter, and I never signed up for Instagram, Pinterest, or the rest. Whatever limited upside there may be to such sites is not worth the costly tradeoff of my time and attention.
As Busch writes, “When identity is derived from projecting an image in the public realm, something is lost, some core of identity diluted, some sense of authority or interiority sacrificed. It is time to question the false equivalency between not being seen and hiding. And time to reevaluate the merits of the inconspicuous life [emphasis mine], to search out some antidote to continuous exposure, and to reconsider the value of going unseen, undetected, or overlooked in this new world.”