The timing of my last post “Where is Home?” was not planned on purpose to coincide with my move to the mountains. I did proclaim in that post that for me, one of the main constituents of the home combo, at least currently, would be the Lebanese mountains, which give me a special feeling I have not experienced anywhere else in the world (even in other gorgeous mountain ranges I have been to like the Himalayas, the Alps, the Rockies, etc.) But to actually move to the mountains a couple of weeks after that post was a bit of a coincidence in timing. But then again, maybe there is always more to coincidences than just coincidence.

I have always been a city boy, and I mean the real city, not the suburbs. From Beirut to Paris to Abu Dhabi to Boston to Cairo, my place has always been in the heart of things, never more than a short walk or a 5 min drive to hedonistic urban pleasures. I have always said I will never live outside the city, and that a visual contact with the city from any apartment I live in is essential.

And yet there has always been this connection to the mountains, and this fantasy of living there and being in sync. But like all untested fantasies, one always runs the risk of reality not living up to the fantasy. And so here I am today, by some unrelated but related turn of events, spending my first day and evening in the mountains, after deciding two weeks ago I wanted to rent an apartment with a view for two months. The intention is to take some time off from the fast pace of what has been so far a super fun but super busy summer, escape the heat of the city, and find some quiet time to recharge and also focus on my ongoing consulting assignments. I also wanted these two months to stretch into the fall, my favorite season, to observe the gradual change of colors.

But at the same time, this decision sort of happened on its own, without too much effort or pre-planning. So it might very well be that the universe read my last blog, or my mind, and is providing me with the opportunity to test my theory about what I think is an essential component of the feeling of home for me. The next two months will be an interesting experiment. Maybe I will discover I cannot take the mountains for extended periods after all and I will always be the city boy I have been so far. Or, maybe I will discover that in fact my intuition is correct, and in that case some interesting life decisions might follow! I will be reporting back on how this experiment is going in about a month.