Green Light

I stopped at a red light earlier today. (It seemed logical.)
I was listening to an audiobook at the time, wherein one of the characters promised he would write to another character constantly. I had to tell myself that he meant email, because my first thought was that he meant handwritten letters. But the other character would not have a permanent address, because she was going to spend some time traveling the world. Email is the only thing that makes sense.
And because I absorbed my twin brother's brain while in the womb, I spent the next 20 milliseconds pondering the profound implications of this...
A letter requires an address. It requires that the recipient is static. But an email lives in some ethereal cloud and can be summoned at any computer with an internet connection, or from a phone. The latter character in the story could have received and replied to any communication from the former character with ease. Instantaneously. Anywhere on earth.
Crazy stuff.
Juxtaposed upon this is an unsubstantiated fact that most people live their entire lives within an hour of the place they were born.
Perspective: If you took the minute it takes to let that sink in and spent it driving towards the hospital where you spent your zeroth birthday, the odds are that you would only need to travel 59 nostalgic miles more before you got there to reminisce.
On the subject of reminiscence, a few years ago, I remember distinctly thinking about how I resented my loved ones, because the thought of losing them was keeping me locked in a dead-end existence. I would die there, a whopping 40 miles from my birthplace. Of course, I had obviously misplaced my resentment, because it was not my loved ones keeping me there; It was my fear of losing them. Of being far away. I was too afraid to leave them all behind.
It had taken a 5-hour trip to convince me that my fears were ill-founded and to create and nurture the thought that I don't have to stay here anymore.
In an age where I can talk to friends on the other side of the world in realtime, where any locale on earth is a webcam away from my present location, what is trapping me in a backwoods retirement community for the rest of my life? What held me down and convinced me that this place would be my home?
My home can be ephemeral! I can go anywhere on earth and live there. What a sublime concept! If you have the power to transport yourself to any location on earth, why would you limit yourself to a circle with a one-hour radius?
It is amusing to think that you can begin to realize that something is possible after you have already prepared to do it.
My reality is in transit.
...And then the light turned green and I pressed down the accelerator.