Here in the southeastern United States, a new school year has begun. Even though I’m no longer a student, there’s something about the beginning of the school year that makes me nostalgic. I remember so clearly the many times I was a new student starting not just another year in school, but often a new school in a new country, with different friends, teachers, curricula, and customs.
Now that I work with college students, I’m struck each fall by those who arrive for their first year, apprehensive and excited, wondering what their college experience will be like. There’s a look in their eyes that I recognize: that mix of starry wonder and pure terror. College offers a chance to forge a new path, but it also means the usual comforts are no longer available to turn to in the stress of transition and adjustment. What was safe and familiar back “home” with family is not easily within reach. For many cross-cultural travelers, this sense of displacement is keen. Aside from the inevitable “Where are you from?” question, there’s a deeper longing for the comfort of “home,” the familiarity of the people, foods, places, smells, and sights that have comprised one’s world. With “home” residing halfway around the world, how does one feel comfortable in a new environment? And what if throwing oneself fully into the college scene means “home” will be lost forever?
In her book Home Keeps Moving, Heidi Sand-Hart calls this the “unquenchable search for a ‘home’ that doesn’t exist” (p. 63). For many of us global nomads, the longing for home is constant. Yet it is not only those of who have lived cross-culturally who feel the pull for a permanent place to belong. Monocultural author Sarah Clarkson speaks of this same longing in an essay entitled Candle in the Window of a Houseboat:
“I am a gypsy soul, a restless-hearted wanderer. For far too long now I have sought my place on earth. My life, outer and inner, feels ever crammed in suitcases as I soldier on to one more new frontier. Though the journey is bright and the changing landscapes rich with adventure, come night, I am weary. My hope grows frail as I trudge alone, again, to a temporary home. The loneliness of my one, striving self far from home; the constant fight to work, to perform, to achieve; the sense of being adrift in an unsettled world: these cluster about me at night. The dread of my own unmoored existence is something I can almost taste. If only, I think, if only I could find my place on earth.
But even then, would my heart arrive at home? In the blackness, I trudge on, stung by the memory of a talk with a friend. Her life is as settled as mine is transient. The hunger haunts her as well. The rest, or rootedness, the sense of belonging we both crave eludes her grasp as deftly as it does mine. The soul can be in exile even when the body has arrived. And in the dark, I wonder. Are all of us doomed to wander on and never arrive, body or heart, at the shelter we desire? To venture bravely forth but never make it back? Is life in a fallen world a houseboat existence? Are we confined to one narrow craft and shoved ever on down the river of life?”
This yearning for a place to call “home” – somewhere to belong – is universal, it seems. As cross-cultural travelers, we may be more familiar with it than most, but we are not alone in our desire for home.
While we may take comfort in knowing that this desire is common to multicultural and monocultural individuals alike, the question remains: What do we do with it? How do we respond to the ache for place and belonging? Clarkson offers an answer:
“…home is the room I carve out at the center of my journey, the space of self and time in which I light the candle of God’s joy and watch it fill the coracle of my heart. Yes, the river rushes on. No, I cannot escape the flow of time, the shove of hunger for a world beyond this, the journey and work to which every heart is born. But home I may craft wherever I go.”
While we cannot guarantee that we will find one place in this world to call home, we can always find a way to make the place we inhabit one in which we belong. Not only that, but we can take elements of “home” with us wherever we go. Home becomes not just a physical place, but an emotional attachment, an enduring sense of identity, a connection to all the pieces of our lives that comprise who we are and where we come from. As global nomad Brian Lev explains:
“Home [is] made up of those memories and emotions I have collected over time, from which I draw comfort and strength as needed. In effect home is a place I can go in my mind, where culture is a mix from many places, and belonging can be taken for granted.…” (p. 64, Home Keeps Moving).
For all of us, whether we’re starting out in a new location or continuing in the same one, the task is the same: make our “home” real, wherever we are. As we put together the pieces of our past and present, leaving room for future moments to be added, we create a new space where we belong, a place that gives us the confidence and security to face whatever changes may come.
[…] time with my friend also helped me remember that I carry home within me. There is something about being in the presence of someone who has known you for a while that […]