"What's the word for when a thing can change into anything it wants?" asks the twelve-year-old Kazakh student in my English class. I search for the endless words that could possibly encase this broad description / she continues eagerly with active gestures: "You know, something that stands in front of a wall and changes colours; like the ugly one in Monsters Inc!"
My new noun: chameleonism. The ability to adapt, and change according to one's surroundings. To carry oneself as a whole, yet be able to disassemble and integrate wherever one goes. To belong with all, but also with none at all. To migrate as a lone independent, whilst using external stimuli to define one's shifting identity. There is also this element of invisibility - the inability to capture one's shape when there's not an environment to hold it.
Our reality solely depends on the way we perceive the world and its happenings; on the illusion that we build. We seek feedback from our surroundings in order to sift out our own reflections. We use our situations, physical space, and people around us in order to realize - or choose - our own identities.
chameleon /kəˈmiːliən/ (noun) a person who changes their opinions or behaviour according to their situation.
When I embarked on my solo travels last year I would hop from place to place where nobody would know the existence of me. Every time I moved, I had the opportunity to tell someone again, who I am. It wasn't assumed that I was a dancer or artist; it wasn't assumed that I wanted to join a salaried dance company; there were no expectations and there was not a clear measure of success and failure. I was a nobody, a blank canvas; but that also meant I could be anybody I wanted to be. Every new environment began a new journey and I felt like I was changing on the daily - my beliefs, my desires, my needs, my dreams, my non-dreams. I was inconsistent. However, out of this inconsistency surfaced a more apparent denominator of who "I" am. The more external change there was, the more space there was to actually observe my truths.
Five months ago I moved to London. And it is here, that I wonder about the concept of arrival. To arrive somewhere seems to imply a completed, static place, if only just for a moment. It is a point that both ends something and begins something. Meaning, there is movement before and after. But making nest in this very point of arrival is perhaps when we stop dynamically changing, learning and growing. This is the first time in the last couple of years that I've decided to "settle" somewhere. That is, open a bank account, own a phone number, sign a lease, personally import my favourite yellow planter from Vancouver, and put it up on my wall. I bought a bicycle, I have a routine, and I actually feel like I have a home. I'm noticing consistencies, and the comfort and security I'm starting to feel by having them. It's lovely. But it's also terrifying. I spent 2016 trying to challenge my ability to embrace the eternally changing, the unknown; insecurity. But now, I'm reacquainting myself with safety and developing attachments to this safety.
So how does one arrive somewhere, and stay a chameleon? Or, how does one never quite arrive? To remain interested in the space that one sees every single day, for a long time? How do we continue to change and observe change when the external doesn't seem to? Perhaps we seek. We question. We fight to notice, and we vow to appreciate. We find the movement in the stillness. It is an effort and it is a meditation.