“Wherever you go there you are”. A friend once gave me a book with this as the title. Its a sort of introspective philosophy. It tells us not to try to change our surroundings looking for something that is within us all the time. When I was thinking about my move to Canada it was something that was in the back of my mind.
There’s a lot of use in the philosophy, but I don’t think its everything. To take it as the be-all-and-end-all sort of assumes that “you” are static, and that you just need to look inside to understand the “real you”. It encourages a meditative attitude. But it can’t be everything. If you take that to its logical conclusion you’d have to ask the question, “when do you become you?”. It denies nurture or environment as a factor, or at least it denies that it has a necessary impact beyond a certain point of age or maturity. If its proposition is that it is always true, then it is so naive to the human condition that it is a useful trinket for meditation but nothing more.
Maybe I am over-emphasising it. Perhaps it should be qualified as ”Wherever you go there you are, but at least they’re not and who knows, it might be nicer”.
I should just add that moving to Canada has nothing to do with getting away from anyone before I give someone as complex!! I’m much shallower than that. I just love the outdoors and with only 33 million people in a country 41 times the size of the UK, there’s a lot of outdoors!!