A friend of mine once told me, “You know, Richard you are writing about the international soul.” Using that term as shorthand for a second, international souls have to travel, to cross cultures, to find their place in the world. It is the way they are liberated from the tyranny of expectations and cultural rigidities and practices that tend to hold people back. They get liberated that way but then lose their moorings, to some degree, and then they have to create new moorings. And the trouble with international souls is that we become residents but never true citizens of any country. Real citizenship requires a committed, deep, I-will-spill-my-blood-for-this-soil kind of sensibility which gets eroded because the more you travel and live in different places, the more you see. You come to realize there are many different perspectives in the world and you become less rigid about the one perspective you inherited when you were born.