EVERYWHERE IS BETTER THAN HOME / a song about restlessness

JUST KEEP MOVING

Traveling around Europe and playing music made me feel less and less connected to the concept of ''home''. When you are always on the move and each new day means a new an entirely different city, the idea of staying in one place because it is your ''home'' suddenly becomes a bit silly. There is so much to see, to experience and to explore that being home feels like a complete waste of time. I know home. Why would I stay home? Being on tour is an entirely different context to be in and live by and it's not similar to anything else. You are completely detached from reality and you just go around and play music, meet people, have fun. Your own problems are being put on hold until you don't return home and you have so much fun visiting new and amazing places each day that it seems to you everywhere is better than home. Of course, all of those places and people have their own problems but for you - those problems are not there and they are non of your concern. It's an interesting socio-psychological situation to be in and a hard one to get out of. By the time we headed back home, we jokingly started discussing the concept of just keep moving. You know, if we just keep moving, we'd eventually find a new gig in a new place and things would start happening all over again. We wouldn't have to go home. When we did come home, we felt an uneasy set of emotions - we were happy to be back with our friends and family, we were happy to share our experiences with everyone interested, we were so damn happy we didn't have to load the van in and out each day anymore and at the same time, we were tired and sad as hell that the tour is over. There was this feeling of restlesness and emptiness that just made us start planning another tour. All of that got me thinking - why did I feel that way? How much of it was real? Where does this restlessness come from? Could it be that the entire human race feels that way without even knowing it? Why did we ever start moving?

BACKGROUND IN HISTORY OR IN PHILOSOPHY?

Okay, we all know how it went - we moved from Africa to all of the other continents due to harsh landscape and climate or in search of better food supply. Centuries and centuries went by and we were moving again but this time to trade with outher people. Soon, trading was overtaken by exploring and exploring by imperialism and imperialism by war. Today, we also move in search of better conditions - we look for better jobs, better schools, safer neighbourhoods etc. We travel to work, we travel because we enjoy it, we travel because we fell in love with somebody from another country. We also travel because of wars, poverty, disease and famine. Whatever way you look at it - we constantly move. This is what it says in the books, this is what we learn in school, this is what is logical and it is what actually happened. However, there is more to life than just facts from books. There is a deeper, scarier, more profound philosophical background in our desire to be on the run. There must be some innate desire in our kind that propels us forwards and if there isn't, there surely must be a pshilosophical concepot that can be transformed into poetry?

THE ETERNAL RETURN

It seems that the idea of the ETERNAL RETURN has its roots in the ancient world but somehow manages to eternally return every once in a while in the works of modern philosophers, poets and even scientists. As Nietzsche put it: If the amount of matter or energy in the universe is finite, then there are a finite number of ways in which things in the universe can be arranged. Either one of these states will constitute equilibrium, in which case the universe will cease to change, or change is constant and unending. Time is infinite, both forwards and backward. Therefore, if the universe ever was going to enter a state of equilibrium, it would have already done so, since in an infinite amount of time, every possibility would have already occurred. Since it clearly hasn’t yet reached a permanently stable state, it never will. Therefore, the universe is dynamic, endlessly going through a succession of different arrangements. But since there is a finite (even though incredibly large) number of these, they must recur every so often, separated by vast eons of time. Moreover, they must have already come about an infinite number of times in the past and will do so again an infinite number of times in the future. Consequently, each one of us will live this life again, exactly as we are living it now. (https://www.thoughtco.com/nietzsches-idea-of-the-eternal-recurrence-2670659). We know now that is is not in fact true because the universe will eventually become cold and dark, after the fuel runs out. However, the implications of Nietzche's version of the theory of eternal return still stand - if it was true, what would we do? How would we act? How would we feel?

WHAT IF THIS IS ALREADY HAPPENING?

All of this got me thinking again - what if this is already happening on a different level? What if we already feel such a notion deep within ourselves? What if this very notion is our reason to constantly be on the run, even though we know there is nowhere to run to? What if we are all Camus' Sisyphus and if we are, should we be happy? What I mean is fairly simple and doesn't have to take in account the entirety of the universe and its possible reoccuring multiverses. It's so simple, in fact, that it makes it even more scary. It's such an every day fact that none of us really thinks about it and yet we are the only species that knows it but still decides to move. It's the fact that the Earth is round. If the Earth is round (and we know it is, even though some flat Earth conspiracy people argue differently), eventually we all come back to same starting point. If the Earth is round, there is no escape. If the Earth is round, how ever much we searched and looked for something else, we are bound to find that everything already is the same since there is nowhere to go. All of our different cultures, all the diversity that we have - it's all stuck on the same piece of rock and where ever it may wish to go, it will end up on this round rock suspended in space. Eventually, we will all come to know each other and, more importantly, we will all come to understand that the reason that we all came to know each other is the fact that we all tried to run away from each other and failed. If the Earth is round, everything happening on Earth is also - round. It goes in circles. It's the Eternal return of sorts. What do we do if we can't escape one another or if we always end up returning to where we've left from? We go beyond. We hit space. We know the entirety of space works in the same way and that the next planet we come to will also be round but we do it anyway. And if the universe is eternally expanding and all the rocks we could land and live on are round, why do we do it? The background of these notions is not scientific or phiolosophical - it's purely poetic. Poetry is the only phenomenon that can make sense out of such a notion and make us consider it for a fact. I've put all of these notions into lyrics and then into song. I hope you will listen to it having all of this in mind and I hope you will enjoy it.