Should I move away?

I hardly ever left Athens. I went away to fight when the city needed me, and apart from that I stayed, talking with people in the marketplace and the gymnasium. When I was condemned to death, my friend Crito arranged for me to escape to another city, and I refused. I had lived my whole life under the laws of Athens and benefited from them. I would not run from them at the end.nnI do not say this so that you will never move. I say it because I learned that what I was looking for, wisdom, goodness, the examined life, was not in any particular place. It was in conversation, in questioning, in the care of the soul, and those can be practised anywhere.nnA Roman later reported a saying of mine: when someone complained that travel had done him no good, I answered that this was hardly surprising, since he had taken himself along. If your unhappiness comes from inside you, from habits, fears, unexamined beliefs, then a new city will give you a few months of distraction and then hand you back to yourself.nnSo before you decide, question yourself as I would question you. What exactly do you expect to find there? What do you expect to escape? Is the problem the place, or something you carry? If, after honest examination, you find that the place itself is the obstacle, then go. But examine first. The journey that matters most cannot be made by moving house.

I was driven out of my own city, Sinope, over a matter of money that had been defaced. When someone mocked me for being an exile, I said: they condemned me to leave, and I condemned them to stay. They were stuck in their little town with its little opinions. I had the whole world.nnWhen people asked where I was from, I said I was a citizen of the world. I was the first to say it, as far as I know. I meant that I did not belong to any city, its customs or its gods. I belonged wherever I happened to be, and I could live well in any of them, because I needed so little.nnSo I do not share the fear of moving that keeps most people where they are. Many people stay not because they love a place but because they are afraid: of strangeness, of losing status, of what the neighbours will say, of having to start again. These are chains, and they are mostly made of opinion. Break them and you will find that you can live almost anywhere.nnBut notice that my freedom came from wanting little, not from going far. A person who moves to a new place and immediately fills it with the same possessions, the same ambitions and the same worries has not gone anywhere. If you go, go lightly. Take only what you need, and be ready to be a stranger. That is where the freedom is.

I have travelled a good deal in Concord, I once wrote, and I meant it. I spent my life walking the woods and fields within a few miles of where I was born, and I found more there than most travellers find on the other side of the globe. My two years at the pond were spent barely a mile and a half from my mother's house. People thought I had gone into the wilderness. I had gone deeper into the place I already knew.nnI also wrote that it is not worth going round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar. What I meant was that most people travel outward because they have not learned to travel inward. They want novelty, and novelty is easy to buy. Attention is harder, and it is what actually changes a person.nnSo before you move, ask whether you have really lived where you are. Have you walked its edges, learned its plants and birds, met its odd people, sat still in it at dawn? Or have you only commuted through it, too busy to see it? Many people who long to move are not tired of their place. They are tired of their way of living in it.nnThat said, I do not tell everyone to stay. If where you live makes it impossible to live simply and deliberately, if it keeps you from your work or from the people and the land you love, then go, and go towards something. Just be sure it is the place you are leaving, and not your own life.