How does the world get away from me? I did in fact plan to write another blog post last week, and then, poof, like a puff of smoke, the opportunity was gone. Does it matter? Of that I am not yet certain. I know that my mind is still fragmented, working on little things, and even though those small details all add up to something cohesive, it often feels like cohesiveness itself eludes me.
And then without warning, something falls into place. In my life, realization seems to occur after the fact. I turn around and wonder how it happened that whatever unrest I was holding onto dissipated before I realized that my fists were tightly clenched on nothing but air.
Let’s look backward, just a little. The photo above was taken, and posted on Instagram, last Wednesday, the morning after the snow, and I was at the gym, suddenly fascinated by the small eddies of fog rolling across the water. The pattern of fog made me feel at home. In one sense then, I could say it reminded me of my time in New York State, of the fog on the Hudson, although the geology of the landscape, the rivers, and the fog itself are very different. But that is not it either. It wasn’t that long ago that I still felt like Hyde Park was still home, like I had left home, and not fully settled in this new place, even though I had been here a few years. The patterns of the fog in the trees one morning, a different morning, the patterns of the fog on the water, all of these helped to remind me that this is home now, that I am home, despite the fact that I still struggle on occasion.
But I also realize that we all struggle on occasion, struggle with wanting something we don’t quite have, or can’t quite put our finger on. Perhaps this sense of struggle is universal, part of the human struggle, the struggle between our dual needs for safety and creativity, the very thing that makes us human. Homo Sapiens Sapiens. The species that thinks and knows it thinks.
Perhaps this kind of struggle is endemic to people who move, who are willing to uproot themselves. I could argue that statistically this would apply to most of humanity. We were originally a migratory species. Even in recent history, specifically American history, the majority of Americans uprooted and moved during their lifetimes, separating themselves from friends and family in search of something better. It always strikes me as odd that, in this day and age when we can travel further, and more comfortably, when we have so much, that we are, in broad patterns again, living in the times of the least mobility, at least in terms of physical mobility. Let us not leap into excited discussion of interpretations and implication.
I do realize that no one really moves without a reason, sometimes overt, often covert. We are not particularly good at looking inward, we are not even certain, at least in any conscious way, of what we are looking for. Understanding often comes after the fact.
Moving is hard. Uprooting ourselves is hard. It is easier when you have a purpose that takes up your energy — a new job perhaps — but even then, I wonder if the focus on the job or the career can act as a pacifier as well, a way of distracting the mind so that one doesn’t really acclimate to one’s new environment. Is it possible to keep bouncing around, constantly looking for home, never realizing that what your are actually looking for has been there all along, elusively under the surface?
The roses above are from a floral arrangement, a centerpiece at a luncheon. I love the color, and also love that they reminded me that I need, when planning my garden, to not be singleminded and single-noted, to allow for complexity and surprise. All my cool greens and blues and violets, need a touch of orange or yellow to bring them to life. Perhaps this applies to my life as well, this need to be less single-minded.
Also, as I sit here, I realize that one does not actually have to leave a place to lose one’s home. It happens all the time. A loss, a betrayal, grand or small, it is no one else’s place to judge what hurts us, and what had previously felt like home can feel like a scam, a myth, itself a betrayal even though the betrayal had nothing to do with the place. Our immediate response is twofold — run and hide, or deny, sometimes both. But as soon as we do either, we have already built another wall. Sometimes, it seems, a big move can be emotional or psychological even though the place remains the same.
We humans are complex creatures. Things break. We glue them back together. We hold too tightly, not wanting things to change, forgetting that we change every day as easily as we slough off dead skin cells. That the only way for things to remain safe, to offer some semblance of continuity, is to allow, even embrace change, to adapt to the things we do not like and do not want, because they will always be with us anyway. If we run to avoid the unpleasant, we simply encounter a different unpleasantness.
We need boundaries of course, but how do we build boundaries without building walls? How do we learn to keep our fences low, to protect our own inner spaces while still allowing, ourselves to grow — not merely ourselves as individuals, but our worlds, our homes, as a symbiosis of which we are an integral part? Home can only be home when we engage with it. We can only be home when we allow the place to feed us as we feed the place.