Displaced

There's a scene in a certain novel--which, if my memory serves, is The Natural, by Bernard Malamud--wherein the protagonist, generally caught up in the mostly unhappy complexities of his life, suddenly pauses for a moment, takes a step back, outside prevailing realities, and ponders with some surprise, "This is not the way I meant things to be. Nothing has turned out as it was supposed to."

Or, to repeat the quote often attributed to John Lennon, but actually not coined by Lennon: "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans".  (Apparently, this has been traced back to someone named Allen Saunders, and was merely repeated in Lennon's song, Beautiful Boy).

So here I sit, an American with no particular interest in the tropics, in a Starbucks in Bali, Indonesia, surrounded by a foreign chatter. The wife I came here to Bali with happens to show up at the same Starbucks, along with her boyfriend, and we sit and chat for a while. And I think ... How strange. This is not how things were supposed to be. This ... none of this ... was in my plans at all. And yet it has simply somehow happened this way.

There is the odd sense, sometimes, that I'm living the wrong life. It's a mistake, an accident. I'm not supposed to be sitting here in a foreign country talking to my wife and her boyfriend. It is absurd! I must get back, I must go home, to where I'm supposed to be.

But where is that? Accident, it seems, has taken me so far afield that cannot even rightly remember the nature of what was 'supposed to have been'. I suppose that its shape is generally composed of everything that is not the case. I suppose that few of us live as we intended to do.