Is the grass always greener?

I can remember clearly the lazy Friday afternoons when I would dream about going abroad to chase my dreams, education and get away from all this..this! This feeling of helplessness and lack of any use. The shortage of money, the headaches. Everything there seemed so new and fresh, seductive even. A whole world to experience and discover, yet I was still here...wasting my life and not doing anything. Fast forward 9 years and now I'm here - but the freshness is gone. The hardships of getting yourself established in this strange land overcome and fast fading into the past, the mystery now uncovered becomes mundane. It's like dreaming about meeting a famous celebrity or personality all your life and when you finally do, you realise they are mean, shorter and just human. Why has it taken a journey of thousands of miles and countless hardships to discover something which was always in front of you?

My friends now tell me that I see back there, with rose-tinted glasses. Perhaps, but this is not any nostalgia where I selectively remember all the good and embellish it even further in the recesses of my mind. This will be a plunge straight back into the madness of it, those hot polluted streets in mid-afternoon, crazy drivers and ridiculous political propaganda. Somewhere inside there are those good things which made me ignore all that in the past. There are the things I never had time to do when I was there, or couldn't be bothered with. The people I couldn't stand seeing. Yet I would happily suckle from that teat of home till I can suckle no more. Then as I lie there, sated and content soaking in that lazy Friday afternoon, I'll instantly burst up in activity and frenzy; thinking up more things I could do which I never thought of when I was here those 9 years ago! You can only be physically free once you break the shackles surrounding your mind - here and there are states of mind.