If you have never moved far from your homeland, the place you were born or raised, but most importantly, the place you were raised and have lived in all your life, then you might want to consider making a major move to a part of the country as far away in culture, geography, climate, zeitgeist, and all general manner of things, ideas, people, and places as possible.

You will want to make the move alone, if possible, so it is best if you are either recently divorced or widowed, or have never been married, or are just leaving home. You will also want to drive in order to see as much of the country between the familiar place and arena in which you have lived most of your life and the new foreign place that you are moving to and have no more experience or acquaintance with than the generalized information any tourist would have, information that is essentially worthless to a newbie who actually plans to live there.

Plan to drive aimlessly around unfamiliar streets if you are moving to an urban area. Plan to get hopelessly lost on a regular basis. Depending on where you move, you will either receive assistance, sympathy, help, or not. In most places, you will find that people will happily watch you hang yourself prior to stepping in and telling you that they could have told you that you didn't have a clue months ago, but...You will undoubtably find yourself wondering what it is about places, and people who've lived there longer than you, that makes them watch you struggle as a newbie with great amusement, albeit not always unsympathetically. Even if you meet people in this new place who wish to help you, you will eventually discover that you yourself are an obstacle to receiving the help and information you need by virtue of the fact that you are of another context entirely and have not yet integrated into the new one. You will find that you may look like the natives and smell like the natives and even think like the natives, but you are as far from understanding the natives as you can be.

Nevertheless, make the move. You will be irrevocably changed. You will go home and find that the old cliche "you can never go home again" is true.

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