Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson - Slipping into Paradise: Why I Live in New Zealand

Part memoir, part philosophical reflection, part travel book, this is an account of why I choose to live in New Zealand. Most people do not get to choose where they live; for the vast majority of humans over the past thousands of years, we are born, grow up, live, and die in the same place. In statistical fact, only 3 percent of the world's population lives outside their home country for a year or more. But increasingly, people have become free to decide where they want to live. For most people, especially in America, this means choosing a place within the United States. But more and more people are electing to live somewhere else.

While visiting Australia and New Zealand several years ago, I suddenly realized that I was not forced to live in North America or in Europe. When I stepped off the plane and saw the bright greenthe giant fern trees that grow only in New Zealandand drove through a prehistoric lush forest, arriving at a beach just fifteen minutes from downtown Auckland, and when I realized that there are 365 beaches just one hour's drive from Auckland, I thought: I have come home. I had found the perfect spot.

New Zealand is the green gem in the middle of the South Pacific, with southerly airstreams that remove pollution; a place where even the rainfall is clean and refreshing. Moreover, it is a social democracy where women occupy important political posts. The prime minister, Helen Clark, is a woman. The governor general, Dame Silvia Cartwright, is a woman. The attorney general, Margaret Wilson, is a woman. The chief commissioner of the Human Rights Commission is a woman, Rosslyn Noonan.

Egalitarianism is the ruling philosophy; and indeed my wife, a doctor, earns little more than the man building our house. When I walk into the bank, there are toys in a small enclosed area where our eighteen-month-old son, Manu, can play. Child-friendly is the term that constantly comes to mind while traveling around New Zealand: Stores have sandboxes, and even the smallest town has an expansive outdoor playground. There are barely four million people in the whole countrythree million in the North Island and only one million in the South Islandso when you drive through spectacular scenery, from glacial in the south to subtropical on parts of the North Island where Auckland is located, yours is often the only car on the road. Everybody you meet is curious about you and where you come from, but in a most friendly and unthreatening way. Sound like paradise? Well, in many ways it is. It reminds me of the Hawaii and California I knew as a child, where neighbors talked to one another and there was a definite sense of community, something rapidly disappearing in many places. I think I will never leave!