Signs and Cushions and the Art of Moving Home
Feel good quotes about home are as many as there are embroidered sofa cushions and hallmark cards. Every time I come across one of these it rattles me. What does home mean? What if someone doesn’t have a home? What if home is the least safe place?
These signs and cushions most frequently appear in houses that seem the least likely candidates to qualify as home. These places smell like sheetrock and are built uniformly in developments where homes get bought and sold almost as quickly as cars.
I belong to the first generation growing up after WW2. Both my parents were uprooted, chased away, and moved around during the war. Traumatic experiences like that don’t just go away the moment the peace treaty is signed. Trauma moves from the event into a person’s memory and body. It becomes part of our cellular make-up.
Before my 33rd birthday I had moved 17 times — 17 times of packing up my belongings; 17 times of transitioning to an unfamiliar environment; 17 times of unpacking boxes; 17 times of moving out; 17 times of moving in. On average each move takes about 2 weeks on each end. That’s 68 weeks of my life that I spent on simple moving tasks — more than a year. That’s more than 10,000 hours, the amount of time needed to completely master a skill according to Malcom Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule.
I didn’t move because I was threatened by soldiers or starvation. When I was young, I moved for my father’s work. By the time I was 16 years old I had already lived in four different places in two different countries and extremely different states within Germany. Moving was exciting and promised growth, adventure and opportunity. For me the unfamiliar began to feel the most familiar, so after graduating high school I continued to move often. After a few years in one place, the creeping familiarity became uncomfortable and disorienting. I wasn’t familiar with familiarity. The familiar felt strange and unknown.
Patterns of uprootedness live in our cellular make-up. I am living proof that cellular memories don’t go away. I have now lived in the same place for 25 years and though I never had any serious reason to move, I find myself rearranging our house, changing workspaces, and orchestrating lots of travel along the way.
My daughter has lived in the same place her whole life. In a recent college application essay she was asked where she felt most at home. She wrote about airports. The most liminal place of all. Did her grandparents’ trauma of uprootedness morph into wanderlust? Her frequent visits to Europe grew into an appetite for more adventure. It made sense that airports felt most familiar to her.
“Where is home?” This question became really charged during the stay-at-home order at the beginning of the pandemic. “Where is home,” or should the question be, “How do I know when I am home?”
The extended stay-at-home order, with all activities and borders closed, gave me the gift of feeling ok to stay put. While my parents had to pack up and run to save their lives, my family and I had to stay put and relax to save ours.
Slowly some of the meaningful quotes about home, the ones too long to fit on a sofa cushion or a greeting card, have begun to make sense in my body. I can feel a slow calming of my nervous system and my feet beginning to yield into the ground underneath me.
Maybe the hours and weeks of packing and unpacking boxes, of navigating new neighborhoods, communities and cultures wasn’t a waste of time, but rather a practice in travel that brought me home.
Although I can now envision staying here for another 25 years, I’m not willing to give up my habit of keeping my belongings to a minimum; I’m always ready to pack a few boxes and head out to a new promise of home. Maybe that’s what T. S. Eliot meant by “Home is where one starts from.”
