Notes from Down Under (an ongoing series): Being Nowhere and Elsewhere

In Melbourne on a rainy evening, I sit by the window, letting Bach fill my empty spaces. Rain drums the pane, smearing neon lights into an indistinct blur, while thunder mutters beneath it all—a bassline echo to music without beginning or end. Bach’s precise, mathematical beauty feels like the only stable thing in an increasingly chaotic world, and as I listen, I feel strangely comforted. It’s as if Bach knows something about equilibrium that I can’t quite grasp—a quiet order in chaos, a harmony reached only through the dissonance between them.

Thousands of miles from anything resembling home, I’m caught between the stiff demands of finishing a PhD and the uncertain shape of whatever comes next. The strange thing about completing a goal you’ve poured years into is that an open space awaits at the other end, raising the unsettling question: what now? This point doesn’t feel like an arrival; instead, it feels like a threshold, with one foot still in a world I’m preparing to step out from and the other hanging over an unknown void.

Existing in this liminal space—feeling both "nowhere and elsewhere"—can be agonizing, but tonight, listening to Bach, I sense something valuable in this discomfort. Living in these in-betweens of life brings a kind of introspection that stability never could. In the still solitude of this stormy night, I start to understand that liminality is a space for creating meaning in the emptiness, for learning to live without the certainty of reaching shore.

Feeling untethered, adrift, I let Bach swirl around me, filling the open spaces with his inevitable progression, and realize that this experience of being "out of place" might actually be a gift. Here, in this foreign country—between past and future—I’m learning to find beauty in transitions, to appreciate the newness of being nowhere and somewhere all at once. And maybe, for now, that’s enough.