Return to Japan

I've returned to the future.  The quiet, patient future.  In my travel weary state I remember that American world of shared car rides, bus rides, conversations, music (on the radio, in the pit, side-by-side), fires in the backyard and on the lake, laughing with old friends, sharing time with family.  Huggable humans will now, once again exist within the framed flat box of my laptop screen.

As I stepped into my apartment this afternoon, I regained a sense of ownership and control of my time, space, eating, practicing, exercising, breathing.  All things that have been put on hiatus, set aside, or compromised in the last month for the sake of being with people.  I allowed them to fill my claimed sense of control that I practice for my own sake in their absence.  Enjoyed being filled with their agendas, moved by their thoughts, touched by them.

Why am I here?  What do I have to learn from this place which is so far from those that I love?  In the return to my place of solitary control, in this moment of vacuum left by the past month, how do I want to fill it?  

It is exciting to return to Japan.  To reawaken my rusty Japanese, to be surrounded by the people and landscape of this country.  But after revisiting my home–and likely the future that encompasses this one in which I live–I wonder how I will start to personally shape this year.  Having returned to America after a year of being severed from its lifelong assumptions, what did I see or feel more clearly?  What does this make me notice about my life in Japan and what can I take from these experiences?  How can I practice them in my life here?