looking forward to enchantment via disenchantment

Sitting in our apartment in Quezon City, I realize that maybe an artist's condition forces us to find situations that will throw us off the balance, logic and stability that otherwise keeps most people afloat. When you come to this age, it seems that there is this need to settle down and know what you want. I have seen classmates and friends getting married, seemingly content and happy with how their lives turned out to be and a resolution to live the rest of the path they have chosen. Of course, they are dear people to me and I respect their paths but I can't help but question this notion of 'stability' brought by settling down. Maybe it's just me, I have been through varying degrees of 'settling down' and going away. Suddenly, I realized that like my other friends from afar, I am a nomad. A nomad in my own city, in my own home and locale. While travel makes me weary, staying put brings even more anxiety than having to bear the boring notion of satisfaction over anything. I could also be just envious of this peace that they have while I struggle with so much discontent and dissatisfaction over many things: including the way that traffic never works, the lines at the MRT that are painfully long and my poverty. Six months after my last trip, I long to thrown off to new environments, awaken my senses to new smells and tastes. I want to be lost again and loose my footing and adapt to a new system and different cycle of life.

I told Jay last night that maybe discontent is a necessity in life, otherwise what else is there to hold on to? Artists live outside the world, while we work to have more active participation in it we also find ourselves hesitant to live in 'it'–to be wistlessly taken by it. As if once in a while, we wish to not participate-to fence sit, in order to participate. Martin Nachbar says that as choreographers, we need to distance ourselves from our own body and from daily live in order to abstract movement into choreography. It has become necessary to live outside our own lives, to abstract intention and motivation and give it's own life. This is why we long for the displacement of travel, of adventure, of illicit love affairs, of drunken nights because these moments allow us the distance otherwise non-existent in our 'normal' waking hours at 'home.' And this is why an artist-in-residency is always an attractive option for us who choose not settle. It is a way of living, packing one's bag and moving to a new workplace because the notion of 'staying put' and settling to a single locale seems unbearably boring and gloomy.