Vox Meditantis

If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be?

Friday, 14th November 2025

“If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be?” sits at the top of the page like the opening line of a novel I’m not entirely sure I want to read.

Outside, November has turned the harbour the colour of old slate, the kind builders keep in case they one day repair a roof properly.

The rain is doing that steady, unshowy work it does here in late autumn – less weather event, more background hum – and the Victorian windows of the consulting room have fogged at the corners as if the day itself is undecided about how clearly it wishes to see.

It’s an oddly cruel question to ask a woman who has just started a beginners’ watercolour class and booked, in a fit of uncharacteristic boldness, two December nights in Québec City.

Anywhere is suddenly not a purely theoretical proposition.

The childhood map

As a child, my answer would have been simple and cinematic: Nevada or Washington, depending on which parent I was most in love with that week.

Mother’s stories of Reno in the 1950s – casino lights, desert air that smelled of dust and risk, the clink and murmur of the gaming floor – made Nevada sound like a place where life was permanently dialled a quarter-turn past ordinary.

She described it not as glamour exactly but as immediacy: fortunes turned in minutes, strangers confessed things over craps tables they’d never tell their clergy, and every night ended with aching feet and the sense that something had nearly happened.

As a girl, I heard that as a promise that elsewhere was inherently more alive.

Father’s Washington was a different kind of mythology entirely – bus routes and cherry blossoms, the quiet dignity of public service, monuments glimpsed between stops, history humming in the background while people simply tried to get to work on time.

His city was less about spectacle and more about continuity: the relief of knowing the bus would come, the ticket machine would work, the route would be the same tomorrow.

Between the two, I learned early that place is never just geography; it’s tempo, it’s expectation, it’s the kind of stories people tell themselves to justify staying or leaving.

By adolescence, I’d added more fashionable answers, of course.

Paris, courtesy of library posters.

London, courtesy of BBC dramas on late-night television.

Some town on the Maine coast I’d never seen, courtesy of a novel with an evocative cover and too much respect for sea fog.

Anywhere but here, in other words – the refrain of teenagers everywhere whose primary complaint is not the town itself but the fact of being known by it.

The adult fantasy of elsewhere

Adults don’t usually say “anywhere but here” out loud; we civilise it into something more palatable.

In my consulting room, it arrives as a job posting obsessively refreshed, a property listing bookmarked in a coastal town three time zones away, a gentle obsession with the imagined moral superiority of Portland, Oregon, or Asheville, North Carolina, or whichever city currently features in think-pieces about livability.

The subtext is usually the same: if I could just get there, I’d finally become the person I’m meant to be.

I recognise the fantasy because I’ve indulged in it more often than I care to admit.

There was a period, about ten years into my practice, when I compulsively read locum adverts for psychiatrists in coastal towns I’d never heard of – Nova Scotia, Cornwall, an island clinic in the Pacific Northwest reachable only by ferry that ran “weather permitting.”

The postings promised precisely what my more restless neurons craved: a fresh start without the indignity of starting from scratch.

Same role, different scenery.

Move your skills, keep your identity, swap your regrets for new wallpaper.

Lately, the fantasy has worn a more francophone coat.

The hotel in Québec began as idle browsing – a winter city with stone walls and narrow streets, somewhere cold enough that solitude feels intentional rather than accidental.

I told myself I was only looking.

Then one October evening, after a watercolour class where my horizon line listing gently to port felt like a metaphor I didn’t especially want examined, I booked two nights.

Not a relocation.

Not a reinvention.

Just a temporary experiment in being unknown.

The confirmation email sits in my inbox like a dare written in a sensible font.

If I could live anywhere, part of me answers immediately: there, in a walk-up room overlooking the St Lawrence, where no one thinks to call me Doctor and the only schedule belongs to the light.

But another part, quieter and more stubborn, points out that I’m already planning my return before I’ve even left.

The clinical truth about moving

Clinically, the question “where would you live?” is almost never about climate.

It’s about self.

People sit in the chair opposite and tell me about the city that will finally cure their loneliness, the rural acreage that will quieten their anxiety, the imagined community that will make them less themselves and more their best selves.

Occasionally they’re right about pieces of it – cities and countrysides do exert their own gravitational pulls.

But the uncomfortable constant is this: wherever you go, your nervous system goes with you.

The perfectionist who burns out in New Corinth finds ways to over-function in Seattle.

The conflict-avoidant partner who feels erased in a terraced house here discovers, to her horror, that she can feel just as invisible in a light-filled loft in Toronto.

The man who is certain his depression is a product of this town’s smallness arrives in a metropolis and discovers the same grey fog waiting for him on the forty-third floor.

Place can sharpen or soften our existing patterns, but it rarely replaces them outright.

When patients tell me “I just need to get out of here,” I don’t rush to contradict them.

Sometimes leaving is precisely what’s required – to escape danger, to access opportunity, to break an intergenerational stalemate that will not budge from within.

But I do tend to ask a supplementary question: who would you be there that you can’t let yourself be here?

The answer, when we sit with it long enough, is usually less about geography and more about permission.

Permission to rest without justification.

Permission to be less competent and more visible.

Permission to be ordinary without experiencing it as failure.

It’s an awkward thing, realising you might be able to grant yourself those permissions without crossing a border.

Awkward and, occasionally, liberating.

Where I actually live

If “anywhere in the world” were a purely aesthetic choice, I might construct something tasteful.

A city with a harbour (I seem to require water), good bookshops, cheap seats at a chamber music series, and a café where they start my tea without asking but still leave the milk within reach as a gesture of democratic possibility.

Somewhere with old buildings that have survived multiple bad decisions, and a river clean-up initiative run by a man who believes environmental stewardship and community building are essentially the same project.

Somewhere there’s an independent grocer who insists I try the better olive oil “just once” and a hardware shop where the owner knows the names of my parents even if they died over a decade ago.

In other words, I’ve just described New Corinth.

My days here are stitched together by small, precise familiarities.

The early harbour walk with Father Walsh, who may or may not be preparing to leave for Wilmington but still shows up at dawn with the patience of someone who understands that conversations about change require multiple drafts.

Marcus’s coffeehouse, where my corner table somehow remains miraculously unclaimed when I need it, and where Jenny appears often enough that I’ve stopped pretending our meetings are entirely coincidental.

The consulting room above the street, with its high windows and leather chairs and bowl of seashells that began as my private eccentricity and have become, over time, a kind of informal liturgy for the anxious fingers of half the town.

The Historical Society, where Maggie conscripts me into oral history projects and grant proposals and, recently, the unnerving experiment of being interviewed as part of the town’s story rather than merely helping to collect it.

Riverfront Books, where Dan appears to have appointed himself my unofficial quartermaster for both literature and beginner-friendly art supplies, slipping extra brushes into paper bags the way some people tuck blessings into pockets.

And, now, the community centre classroom on Harbour Street, where I stand in front of cheap paper on Tuesday evenings, learning to tolerate wrong brushes and imperfect skies in the company of strangers who are too busy wrestling their own horizons to judge mine.

If you drew a map of meaning rather than roads, most of my lines would converge on this small radius.

If I could live anywhere, a surprisingly honest answer is: I already do, I just haven’t been fully inhabiting it.

The other lives I sometimes imagine

This isn’t to say the question doesn’t tempt me into parallel universes.

There is a version of me who stayed in Philadelphia after residency, commuting between a teaching hospital and a brick rowhouse, arguing about psychopharmacology at departmental meetings and pretending not to miss the sea.

There is one who did take that locum job in Nova Scotia, living above a clinic where the wind scours the paint off the clapboards and the patients arrive with stories of storms in both weathers.

There is a bolder, or perhaps more reckless, Catherine who never returned to New Corinth at all, choosing instead a city where no one remembers her mother’s laughter or her father’s route schedule, where anonymity would have allowed for grander experiments and, possibly, grander mistakes.

Sometimes I try these versions on the way one tries on coats in a shop one can’t quite afford: briefly, guiltily, with just enough seriousness to feel the weight.

They all have their charms.

But when I follow any of them past the first flush of novelty, they all begin to look suspiciously like my actual days – schedules, patients, books, solitary dinners that sometimes feel like intentional sabbaths and sometimes like elaborate avoidance.

The variable isn’t the skyline.

It’s how present I’m willing to be in whichever room I’m in.

The real question

Increasingly, the question “where would you live?” has come to feel like a stand-in for a different one: “what sort of life do you want to be at home in?”

The geography matters, of course – it’s easier to practice courage in a place that doesn’t actively erode you.

But the more awkward, more consequential work is internal.

Would I like a little flat in Québec, with snow piled against the windows and a view of the river that isn’t the Delaware for a change?

Yes.

I’m going for two days precisely because a different river and a different language might loosen something that has grown too tight here.

Would I like, occasionally, to walk Reno’s streets and see if any fragment of my mother’s younger self lingers in the angle of a doorway or the cadence of a waitress’s joke?

Yes.

It would be good to stand, just once, in the city that formed her and see whether the neon I grew up hearing about looks as hopeful or as tired as she sometimes did at the end of a long day.

Would I like to ride one of Father’s old Washington routes, if they existed in some preserved form, and watch his city pass by from the vantage point he knew best?

Of course.

Place is a form of biography.

But if a genie offered me permanent residence anywhere – a Parisian apartment, a Scottish island, a brownstone in some carefully curated Brooklyn neighbourhood – I suspect the more honest wish would not be for a different address, but for a different posture within whatever address I occupy.

To live, fully, in one life instead of half-living in multiple hypothetical ones.

To stop being extraordinary at adjacency, as I wrote last month, and risk being ordinary at presence.

That is less cartography and more courage.

So, where would I live?

Today’s answer, which I reserve the right to revise, is this: I would live here.

In New Corinth, with its harbour that smells of rust and river silt and beginnings.

In the Victorian building whose walls have absorbed three decades of other people’s stories and are just beginning, unnervingly, to insist that I tell more of my own.

In a community where the barista knows my order and my evasions, where the priest on the seawall refuses to let me disappear entirely into abstract theology, where my brother rings from his newly unstructured afternoons to compare notes on the unsettling business of becoming more than our CVs.

Here, where there is a man with careful hands who has started appearing not just in passing but at my table, in my kitchen, in the risky category labelled “possibility.”

Here, where Tuesday evenings smell of cheap paper and expensive courage, and where my sky lines may never improve but my tolerance for imperfection already has.

Here, with a suitcase occasionally packed for elsewhere – not as escape, but as pilgrimage – so that I can remember, now and then, that the world is larger than this harbour and that I am allowed to be someone other than “Dr Bennett” for forty-eight hours at a time.

If I could live anywhere, it would be in a life where I show up more fully to the one place I already am.

In this town.

In these rooms.

In this body, with its particular history and its stubborn hopes.

Anywhere, in other words, that allows for the quietly radical project of staying.

For now, New Corinth will do nicely.

Catherine

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Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.