A nephew of mine just graduated high school last March and is starting college in Ateneo this June.  During his graduation party, I congratulated him.  He responded, "Thank you--at last, a fresh start!" 

Although I was surprised at his perspective, I did understand what he meant.  In fact, I can identify with his meaning more and more as my return to Manila approaches.  In all the years I have travelled and all the times I've been away, this is actually the first time I've not looked forward to going home.  Being here, working here--it's all been a fresh start, a chance to do new and interesting things, to work with new people, to live up to new challenges and expectations. 

Of course, I realize that my situation here is artificial. The transcience of my visit creates a heightened sense of excitement and urgency. If I stayed here much longer, I suppose the emotions will settle into a calmer, more realistic sort of normalcy.  However, there's something to be said about being freed of having to care about things that I don't actually care about, and just having a chance to just care about me and mine for a change.  This is the first time I've ever felt so great a temptation to run away from home and run towards an existence that just feels so much more simple and focused. 

I realize that the contrasts of home and here make the "here" much more attractive.  In literature, some characters or situations are foils of others, which is to say that their creators design them to be different from other characters or situations in order to emphasize characteristics.  Without the foil, the main character loses some of his/her definition.  I wonder whether without, for example, Ateneo in my life, the temptation to stay here would be as strong?  Indeed, I wonder if my current interests in AI in Education or Affective Computing would even exist without Ateneo, or if I would feel so desperate to make time for research if my time were not so parcelled out to many other non-research-related concerns?

I don't think I'll ever have an opportunity to find out for sure, but I hypothesize that existing in the tension is much of what drives me, and that to lose half the equation would make the other half less necessary.  It's very 1 + 1 = 3.

So maybe a fresh start isn't really the order of the day. Perhaps the order of the day is reinvention, a building on the old to create the new.