While interviewing for a job in 2005, I had a famous phrase I found myself repeating during the day of grueling group process: "I don’t care what people read, as long as they do." At some point over the course of the day long inspection my slogan was amended with "even if it is Harry Potter." This was the ultimate call sign of my liberality since I was a doctoral candidate at the time in literature no less. With this statement I was indicating my openness to popular trends including the boy wizard that was taking the world by storm in 800 page installments.

Since that interview my life has been very diasporic and that job a gateway leading me down the path to this very moment . If I had foresight that afternoon I would have known that my life was about to take a very nostaligic turn, taking me back through the early countries and cities. of my childhood but this time as a sentinent adult.

Soon after I left that job, I began tracking younger iterations of myself all over the world, wondering if I would see the child or the adolscent in the corner of my eye if I turned quickly enough.

First an invitation to a conference in India to  the same city where my father studied for his own PhD which I had no memory of at all.

Then traveling to the first city I lived in the U.S.in Palo Alto, California to show six students from Qatar University around the same campus where my father was a postdoc.

And now, a member of the staff of a joint venture working for the very publishers of above mentioned 800 page series on boy wizard.

Is this how life is for everyone and mine is just showing the threads earlier than most, I wonder, thinking I’m seeing the front and back of this tapestry in progress, part amazed by and part baffled at the symmetry.

Have you come full circle in an unexpected way? When? How long did it take you to catch on?