Mountains Made Low

This is the “deep thoughts” post I promised on Friday morning. It is the result of a week spent largely driving—about 28 hours (give or take) total, in the past six days, and the accompanying time to think, as well as a two-hour, or so, conversation about these ruminations and their accompanying emotions, sensations, and feelings. I’ve been on the road a lot this week, and while the iPod—books and music both—have kept me company pretty well, I was still left with a lot of time, and brainpower, to think. This is (some of) what I came up with!

Home has always been a tricky concept for me. I am loathe to use the word nomadic to describe my life thus far, but “if the foo shits,” as the saying is…. I am 33 years old, and I have just signed a lease for my 23rd place to live in that space of time.

Granted, I can’t be held much accountable for the 13 places I lived in the first 18 years of my life, but the 10 places in the past 15 years (not including the year in a college dorm room)? Yeah, pretty much down to me.

As I may have said before, here, there is no “house I grew up in.” And I never have a feeling of “going home”—at least not concerning a house, but really not concerning a geographical space of any sort.

Sometimes I use the word, but my tongue almost always trips over it. I don’t have a place where I can go and say, “This is home.” Even in the year that I’ve lived where I do now, the first house I’ve ever owned, I’ve stumbled over calling it home. It’s not home…. It’s my house. When I got back from my Ohio trip, yesterday, the feeling was not “coming home,” the feeling was “being back in NC.”

Part of my problem here is that I have been looking for that feeling of home for quite some time. I thought, when I moved here, that I had found it…. In terms of the house, in terms of the job, in terms of the environment—yes, indeed, I thought I had found it. But I was wrong. At some point, what I thought would be home became just another place I was living.

On Wednesday, while I was in Ohio, I didn’t go to Fremont on my multi-day, much-driving house and job expedition. I stayed in Wooster all day. When I talked, that night, with KAS, she asked me if I’d gone to Kidron to see people we knew when we were in high school there (mostly friends’ parents and others we’d known from church in our high school years—most of our high school friends have, like us, left).

I said that I hadn’t. When asked why, I told her that it’s sort of strange for me because, for me, Kidron is where I’m from (in the sense of where I came of age), but it’s not who I am. I still like most of these people well enough, but I don’t feel a sense of nostalgia or longing concerning the town, the school, the church, or most of the people.

As I explained this (badly—and I’m not sure I’m doing much better now), I drew on the “nomadic” nature of my life. I have never had roots, I was basically saying, but then something she said stopped that train of thought dead.

I realized that I do have roots. But they’re not the sort of roots most people (me included, apparently) would think of as roots.

She told me, repeating back what she heard me saying in her own words, “Home isn’t a place, for you—it’s people.”

And as the conversation went on, I explored that thought. Because it’s spot on. My parents are “home.” My sister is “home.” My very closest friends, KAS herself included, are “home.” (In case anyone was wondering why her birthday rated a whole blog post to itself… now you know!)

We can add this to the list of things I’ve learned this year, I suppose. I’ve been looking, really searching, for a place to call “home” for a long time now. I knew I wouldn’t find it while I was still in school, of course—the life of a student is transient at best, and it’s hard to put down roots in any of those places.

But I’ve been looking for a place. Because I’ve never really said, “I’m going home.” Since I lived in Indiana, I’ve gone “to Ohio,” or (when I lived in Columbus) up “to Wooster.” I’ve never gone home. And my arrivals back from trips have been just that: I’ve arrived back, not home.

Contrary to what I had been thinking for a long time, though, I do have roots. But those roots are not in a place (or even a number of places). They are, instead, in people. In relationships. That’s where home resides for me: In family, and in friends. I should have known this long ago—I can be more “at home” in a strange place and in the company of friends than in my own house.

Home, for me and as the saying is, is where the heart is. It’s with the people I care about, and who care about me. I’ve spent some time looking for something outside of that, a place I can call home. But maybe I shouldn’t worry so much about that. Maybe I shouldn’t ask any more of a place than to be a roof over my head.

I should content myself with knowing that home exists for me, and I should spend more time with those people who… well, who “feel like home,” to me. Because that’s “where” my home is; that’s where I feel safe and at peace.

And I’m beginning to think that maybe that’s enough.

On Sunday, I posted a review of Lisa Unger’s Beautiful Lies. Granted it wasn’t a great review, for which I choose to blame the Benedryl. But I’ve been thinking through some of the ideas that Unger—along with her narrator/protagonist, Ridley Jones—deals with in the novel. Particularly, the life philosophy Ridley espouses in terms of second guessing her decisions; big decisions or small ones, for good or ill—every decision we have made brings us to where we are, and there’s no way of knowing what might have happened if we had made another choice at any point along the way.

When we don’t like the outcome of decisions that we’ve made, we tend, I think, to romanticize the road not taken. I know I do, anyway. I’ve done that quite a bit as the past year here in North Carolina has unfolded. When the job didn’t turn out to be the great opportunity I’d expected it to be. When “rural” became “isolated.” When it became clear that I wanted to leave but that I now own a house here.

I got to thinking about how, if I’d stayed in Columbus, at Capital, I’d most likely have been tenured and promoted this year. About how I likely wouldn’t be tethered to a mortgage payment. About how I would be living in that sense of “home” about Columbus, and Ohio more generally, that I didn’t even really know I had.

And that’s kind of the point, I think. Not only do I not know now how those things would have gone had I stayed (though I’m almost certain of at least the job part, given how things were going when I was there), but I didn’t know some of the things I’ve learned now. It’s almost like I needed to come here—to make some of these mistakes (as I see them now)—in order to know what I want.

I have a quote from an episode of How I Met Your Mother on my Facebook page. I put it there because I think it’s, generally, pretty good advice. “For the most part, if you’re really honest with yourself about what you want out of life, life gives it to you.” That same idea was put to me in a comment on this blog about a week ago: “Ask the universe for what you want. Be truthful. What do you really want? And maybe, just maybe, you will get it.”

Being honest or truthful about what we want features prominently in both of these formulations. And, in fact, I’m pretty clear, in my own mind, about what I want. I want to move back to Ohio. I want a job in which my standard 110% commitment of time and energy is good enough. I want to be able to help my parents out as they continue to get older. I want to be in a city, or at least a town. I want the kind of general stability that allows for true spontaneity. I want to be a good friend.

And I’m willing to work at and for these things…. Really I am.

There are other things I want, too. But asking for more than these right now seems greedy. And even this list provokes fears in me, and makes me scared. Scared that I won’t get the job I’m interviewing for next week; scared that I will. Scared that I’m somehow pushing my friends away. Scared that I’m making more mistakes.

But that last fear, I’m working very hard to put aside. Because I’m being honest about what I want. And I’m going after those things. And I’m working hard at not second-guessing the decisions I’ve made that have brought me here, either. After all, those decisions—those mistakes—have made me who I am and have taught me what I want.

They can’t, then, be all bad, can they?