In California, as in many other states in the U.S, it’s hardly a thing to drive an hour to visit a friend. In fact, friends an hour to a two-hour’s drive away are considered to be living relatively close by. This makes sense in a country where an hour commute just to get to work each day is considered a perfectly normal pain in the ass.
In The Netherlands, if a friend moves to a region that’s an hour away, it has about the same impact on your social life as moving out of state–you are suddenly viewed as geographically undesirable to all except your very close friends.
At first glance, this doesn’t make any sense at all. The entire country of The Netherlands is less than 1/10th of the size of the state of California. Given its tiny size, shouldn’t everyone in this cute little country be considered geographically desirable?
Yet it’s a common phenomenon.
I have to admit, when I came back to The Netherlands in 2011 and settled in The Hague, I rarely visited my expat friends I’d met in Amsterdam seven years earlier. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see them. It just seemed like Amsterdam was far away and a bit inconvenient. Not to mention that the round trip train fare is about twenty-four euro and driving to Amsterdam is not a great choice either, as parking is scarce and parking fees excessive.
So what will happen to all of my friendships I’ve developed over the last eight years now that I’ve moved an hour and fifteen minute’s drive away and a close to two hour train ride away? Will they meet the same fate as my Amsterdam friendships all those years ago? Or will there be mutual effort to see one another?
If the first quarter is any indication, we haven’t dropped off the face of the earth and friendships are holding strong despite our relocation to Schagen. We’ve had multiple visitors from The Hague, and even a few from as far away as Berlin and Luxembourg. Other friends are planning visits in January and February and Dutch family members have made the effort to visit us on more than one occasion. It’s exciting, but there is that looming fear or fact that the novelty will wear off and our friends we used to see a few times a month will morph into Facebook friends: you have a somewhat skewed (happy) version of what’s going on in their lives, but without that face to face contact, you lack the personal connection needed to go deeper.
Well, luckily, the train travels both ways. I’ve already been back to The Hague four times for various appointments, and have managed to visit a handful of friends on each trip. Sometimes, my visit with a friend is only an hour long, but that is long enough to reconnect. And since you know you won’t be running into that friend by chance in the supermarket, there seems to be an intensity to the visits, like we’re all paying a bit more attention.
Although my social visits were wonderful, it felt a bit surreal being a ‘tourist’ in my former city of residence. Another oddity was that I actually knew where I was most of the time. When I lived there, I had a hard time navigating this sprawling city, and was known for getting lost even when visiting places I’d been a handful of times before. 
Yet during my last few trips to The Hague, my internal geographical map was fully functional and I easily navigated my way around. Ironic that I had to move away for this to finally happen!
But back to time and what it means, how it feels, how it changes. An hour can be a long or short time, depending on what you are busy doing. On a trip to the organic farm with a newfound friend, we got to talking about time. This particular friend is in his seventies and even though he has quite a lot of activities in his agenda, he quite often says, “take your time” or “there’s no hurry, we have all the time.” It could be that I’m used to rushing or it could be that he’s particularly relaxed. I think it’s somewhere in the middle.
He and his wife are laid back people and even though life has thrown a few nasty curves their way, they really seem to enjoy life to the fullest. If they have regrets, they don’t dwell on them. Instead, they seem to approach the world like the inside of a Christmas card: with peace, love and joy. I could chalk this up to small town life and a Christian outlook, but it’s bigger than that. It’s a learned sense of time; you can rush it or you can zen it. Either way, it’s going to pass. After that hour together, I felt slightly changed, more chill, more zen. I suppose this is a good example of actions being more influential than words.
They are not the only influence in reshaping my perception of time. I am currently blissfully jobless and loving it. I am also being very careful not to sign up for too many volunteer activities, clubs and other time devouring commitments. I was completely overbooked in The Hague. No matter how fulfilling it might have felt to be over-committed and socially saturated (e.g. running around like a chicken with its head cut off), I am planning a different path for my life in Schagen.
Free time takes a bit of getting used to, but luckily, I’m no longer one of those people whom you silently think of telling “life is what happens to us when we are making other plans” (Apparently Allen Saunders, 1957, not John Lennon, 1980).
Now I’m one of those people who is thoroughly enjoying the time I do have and surprised on a regular basis at how quickly it can flutter away, despite my very much “in the moment” approach.
Yet there is one other influence who is slowing time right back down. Her name is Jamie and she is a time expander as well as a time magnet. She’s also a chick-magnet, an old-man magnet, a teenage-magnet, you name it, she draws ’em in. She’s just a little thing, but she demands many hours of my time each day and she’s too cute and dependent to ignore. No, I didn’t secretly have another child, but we did something pretty close; we got a little Beagle puppy. 
As you can imagine, there might be a number of blogs in the near future themed around a puppy named Jamie. If you don’t like puppies (what the hell’s wrong with you?) then you might want to skip any such puppy posts, should they ever get written up.
I have spent many an early afternoon with her curled up on my lap, tired and happy from her afternoon walk, but fidgety and whiny if I don’t stay right there while she falls asleep. She’s growing in leaps and bounds and has almost doubled her weight in the last month. The lap naps are over as she hits the three-month mark (that’s a pre-teen in a dog’s life) and now she thinks she is ready to take on the world. We all know that the puppy phase only lasts a few seconds, so I am doing my best to enjoy this precious time.
It might have taken me an hour to write this up, but that’s an hour well spent. Wishing you a new connection with time throughout the Christmas days.
Kristin in Holland
kristininholland 