Home is Where the ? Is

Hi(gh)

Last Friday I boarded a plane and winged my way back to the Midwest without incident. It was the first time I'd been back to my ancestral home in over a year. I make the distinction between "ancestral" and straight up "home" because, well, it hasn't really felt like home for a good long time. Not that that's unusual for a person my age. I was doing the calculations last night and realized that I've spent more of my life away from this particular "home" than living there. It's gotten to the point where, while it's remained comfortable, it has ceased to feel familiar. Most of my nostalgic recollections of childhood are necessarily rooted in my memory, because the people, places and things that it involves have eroded and disappeared.

Nothing gets one thinking deep thoughts like being hundreds of feet above earth.
As I came into land and could barely make out the foamy white waves and sand bars and coastline of Lake Michigan, I kept waiting to feel that exhalation of breath, that relief of homecoming. But it didn't come. Because my home is still New York. I can't figure out why the pangs of longing for my old urban home have begun to be so unrelenting of late -- certainly over the last sixteen months I've had my moments of missing my old stomping grounds. But lately it's become almost unbearable. I no longer have a life there, really. My apartment is no longer mine, and the seemingly endless list of friends I felt I once had there has been edited, abridged, distilled into a few stalwarts. I know that if I were to go back, my life would look and feel different than it had before I departed. And perhaps that's what I've been waiting for. 

 On day two of my visit "home," I went to see the new Todd Haynes movie "Carol," and was positively stricken when I saw the interiors and street scenes of my New York, albeit in reality the New York of the mid-century. I felt tears prick my eyes and it was all I could do to keep it together for most of the rest of the film, swallowing lump after lump in my throat as images of busy street corners, packed bars, pre-war apartments and gilded hotel lobbies danced before my eyes. Sure, it was a Haynesian (i.e. gauzy and gorgeous) rendering of a bygone time, but behind all the mood lighting and period costumes, my city peaked out, unmistakeable as ever. 

The next several days were followed by multiple encounters with family members, and the inevitable questions of how I'm liking my life and my new job and etc. And not being one to mince words, I spoke frankly about the challenges of the work and how much I miss my old New York home. I talked about what this might mean with my mom, whom I'd finally won over with the idea of my moving back to Indiana at the completion of my training to start a farm, and who had so warmed to the idea of having me nearby that she came up with a name for our farm and presented me with a metallic goat she dubbed our mascot. As with everything in my life, she told me that it would be "ok" if I decided not to pursue that plan after all and then immediately commenced offering up a number of alternatives, most of which still entailed me moving home. Er, "home."

The internet has been particularly clogged with post-New Years treatises on how one can unlock one's full potential and live one's best life, all sorts of cheats and mind tricks one can adopt in order to be better, happier, calmer, etc. And while fewer in number there have also been the requisite inverses of these sorts of pieces, full of plainspoken sarcasm about how you are fine and you need to stop worrying so goddamned much. I stumbled across once such article, which, among other things, exhorted that moving to a new place would not solve one's problems because after the novelty wore off, you'd be back where you started emotionally. I wondered if that was what I was finally experiencing in Vermont, and whether the answer was simply to stay the course and begin to unpack all the emotional bits and bobs I'd been hauling around with me forever and try to deal with them rather than assigning all of my potential happiness to an imagined future time and place.

Moving back to New York, or back home to Indiana, won't make me a happier person. At least I don't think so. According to all the faux intellectual articles crammed with buzzwords like mindfulness and gratitude and resilience I've devoured via Facebook over the last month, I have all that I need to be happy where I am. 

I'm beginning to think it's less important what I do  or where I do it, and more important that I continue the work of being content. It's hard to let go of the conceit that something I do will be great, will make an impact -- I think it's a function of youth to entertain notions that you or your work will be recognized as important or special. The more I relinquish this idea, the more I feel certain that the daily grind is less essential than the lifelong project of knowing oneself, trying to improve where one can and accepting the parts of oneself that, while imperfect, are less likely to be changed or changeable. I think that the relative quiet and lack of distraction in Vermont has afforded me the space to do a good amount of that work in the last year, and I've learned plenty about being a more reliable and industrious person as well -- lessons that I fear still lay like a scrim over my more deeply rooted attributes and habits. Who knows whether they will remain if I place myself back in the thrust of my old, shiftless, social-intensive life in the city, or in the soporific bear hug of my childhood home. 

Maybe it all comes down to feeling old, wanting to travel back not to a place but to a time, when I was younger, prettier, lighter, more connected, more loved. 

Regardless of whether I go or stay, I am committed to my cheese life for the time being. I feel transformed by the challenges of the work, and while the nagging suspicion that it will not ultimately be my path is gaining ground, I want to give the delicately wrought changes this life has made to my psyche time to settle into my bones. And who the hell knows? Maybe by then they'll have grown too heavy for me to move.