I was in Belfast two weeks ago. It’s a great city. The first thing I did after checking into the hotel was take a walk. It was Sunday morning, so not much was going on in the streets. However, down the street from the Belfast Hilton is a “weekend market.”. It was open, so I checked it out.
The market was alive with activity. Even though it was cold outside and the air in the market was smoky from sizzling breakfast food, there were plenty of people milling about. It was a great first experience in the city, and it gave us a hint of what was to come.
At the tail end of our trip, on the last might in town, I went to a Mexican restaurant to get a sense of what “Mexican” means in this part of the UK. So, I started my trip by jumping right into Belfast life and ended it by looking at a part of the world through Belfast-tinted lenses.
Mexican food in Belfast is sort of like Mexican food but not really. It has all the right ingredients. The familiar tastes are all there. It even looks sort of right. But it isn’t; it just isn’t right. There is just something…missing. But the wrongness makes sense in it’s own way.
Everything suffers by comparison if it’s not the original. Sounds elementary, I know, but it’s often an overlooked truth. Unfortunately, we spend a crapload of time making those comparisons. And when we compare the present to the idealized past, the present fails the comparison test. How can it not?
The present can never be a return to the past. The past can never be brought into the present. They are, by definition, mutually exclusive. No matter how hard you try, no matter how many of the original ingredients you gather together, every attempt to recreate the past is simply another present moment.
So, appreciate THAT; appreciate the present moment. Don’t curse it for what it isn’t; love it for what it IS.
Sort of Like Mexican food in Belfast.
Illuminate Possibilities 
i couldn’t help but smile all through this! the message is totally good – one i was just discussing with a friend on monday. but the part about looking for mexican food and comparing it to what you know just made me happy. when i first moved to mexico my family went out to eat at a pizza place, looking for the familiar american food. what we found was what looked like pizza, it had cheese, meat and veggies – but it was still different. probably more different than your mexican food in belfast was, but it was a similar experience in that we were looking for the familiar in a different world and were disappointed that it was different. soon after that we learned to love the different and it became the familiar. and since coming back to the u.s. i’m always in search of the tacos al pastor like we had at la onda. they’re just not the same. :)keep up the belfast stories – i’m excited to learn all about your new life adventure.