22

RETURNING

Benedictine monks take, among other vows, a vow of stability. In it, they promise to stay in the monastic community in which they enter, and to not move unless they’re sent elsewhere by their superiors. They stay put. If this idea was so radical during Benedict’s sixth-century Italian life that it called for a monastic vow, imagine how utterly antithetical this idea is to our frenetic, whirlwind twenty-first-century society. I can’t imagine the possibility of this kind of rootedness.

Six in ten adults move to a new community at least once in their lives, and the average length of a job is only 4.4 years now. Smartphones, Wi-Fi, toll roads, and commuter jets make it a cinch for modern-day nomads to work from anywhere and take their lives on the road. This isn’t a bad thing, necessarily; the average Western adult has a range and reach that Benedict and his followers could not fathom a thousand years ago. We can visit lifesaving doctors the next state over; we can surprise our mother on her birthday across the country; we can interview for a new job stationed a thousand miles away before we say yes to it.

For those of us who can take our work wherever we go, contemporary infrastructure paves the road to geographical freedom. We can check e-mail from a chaise longue on a Thai beach. We can Skype with our boss from an Austrian coffee shop. Our work deadlines are dependent only on a decent Internet connection and foresight to calculate the time difference. Add worldschooling to the mix, and the whole family can be anywhere, together.

Modern conveniences make for grand adventures. But they don’t always cultivate stability.

Because flight patterns and passports make it possible to be literally anywhere in the world, it’s tempting to dream of being there. By there, I mean anywhere. I can be in a hammock hovering over powder-white sand on the Mediterranean, and suddenly I’ll wish I were in a mountain cabin in the Southern Alps. I’ll be in my favorite megacity, and while I sway in tandem to the other bodies around me on the London Underground, I’ll drift in daydream to a plebeian village in the Swiss countryside, preferably one I’ve not yet visited. My kids and I will be canoeing down the Deschutes River in central Oregon, and I’ll crave insatiably for food-truck tacos in downtown Austin.

Traveling means touching, tasting, smelling the world. It means the chance to explore hamlets and boroughs that citizens the world over call home. Through travel, you can know, firsthand, the difference in taste between the bread in Sri Lanka and Turkey. You’ll add years to your life with more layers, thicker skin, and a softer heart because of it. Travel is a gift.

But travel doesn’t provide stability. And isn’t it in stability that we find home?

Twentieth-century Trappist monk Thomas Merton explains the vow of stability this way: “By making a vow of stability the monk renounces the vain hope of wandering off to find a ‘perfect monastery.’ This implies a deep act of faith: the recognition that it does not much matter where we are or whom we live with.”

Choosing stability over volatility means staying put when life throws a curveball. It means digging in your heels when the economy sends your housing price crashing, or when community crime rates skyrocket. Possibly even harder, stability means staying put when life gets boring.

I find it fascinating that in all our exploring of the world’s nooks and crannies, my three kids most loved the times we settled down and stayed somewhere awhile. A year after we returned to the States, I can ask one of them their favorite part of our year, and their answer is usually “the month we lived in Sydney and fed chickens in the backyard,” or “the month we lived in France and built Terabithia.” We bring up memories from the Great Wall of China, the Daintree Rainforest in Queensland, and the Eiffel Tower, and after a few minutes of reminiscence, they turn the conversation, preferring to talk about the houses that accompanied them:

Remember that loft in France with the Star Wars chess set?

I loved Chiang Mai—we each got our own bed.

Remember the triple bunks beds in Uganda?

I totally wish we could have chickens like in Sydney.

I didn’t travel around the world with my family to “find myself,” but I was curious what I’d learn about home. Can home be anywhere? Is home where I’m originally from? Where I’ve lived longest? Do we even need a place to call home, so long as we have each other? Some people live “location independent,” making the entire world their home—they’ll park for a while in one neck of the woods; then when the wanderlust itch needs scratching, they’ll pack up again and move to a new spot. Could this be a feasible way of life for us?

The single most significant thing we gained when we paused in Thailand, Australia, and France was community. By staying in one place for a month or longer on our travels, we burrowed into our surroundings and invested in neighbors, even if only for a little while. We stayed put—in a nomadic sense, anyway—long enough to cultivate relationships unshielded by the next great thing to see, the next place on our itinerary.

The nuns at Our Lady of Mississippi Abbey say that by taking a vow of stability, they are “resisting all temptation to escape the truth about ourselves by restless movement from one place to the next.” Resisting all temptation to escape the truth about ourselves. That’s an easy thing to do in our rapid-fire world.

Just for fun, I snapped photos of mailboxes around the world. The aim was at least one per country, and I almost made my goal. I had no ulterior motive for this; I simply wanted a side project as we filled our days with train-hopping, worldschooling, and scoring coffee by whatever means necessary (which sometimes meant fashioning a pour-over from a soda can, a paper airline cup, and a stolen coffee filter from the previous guesthouse). I’ve always admired mailboxes, seen them as a focal point in a house’s curb appeal, and have lowered my enthusiasm for a potential home if it had a boring street-side gray metal box with locked cubbies.

Before my mailbox photos, I don’t think I noticed that the majority of the world’s mailboxes are red. At least they are in the countries we visited. Many were impressive—intricate ironwork painted a vibrant cardinal, impossible to miss and oozing with charm. Others were less so—a simple, rusted box with a lid, available to the public and wired to a pipe on an apartment building. One in Sri Lanka was derelict, strapped on a fence and so faded I’m not sure it’s justifiably considered red.

All of them, no matter how picturesque, meant one thing: people lived there. Citizens needed to mail stuff to another address that had, presumably, a mailbox as well.

Mailboxes are portals to the rest of the world, where, with just a few stamps, we have access to almost anywhere on the globe. This was a marvel before the Internet, and if you think about it, it’s still astonishing that we could send a postcard halfway around the world in just a few days. If we wanted to reach back in reply, all we’d need is an envelope, something to say, and a few more stamps. We have access to the whole world, right where we call home.

Where we call home in the world matters.

When our travels ended, no one was more surprised than I that we decided to move back to Austin, Texas, my birthplace. Because of our life in Turkey and then Oregon, it had been almost a decade since we’d lived here, and the kids mostly knew of it as a city where we visited people. It was always fun, and we’d return to either Turkey or Oregon with full bellies and happy hearts, grateful for the people who provided our excuse to visit. But Kyle and I routinely bemoaned the thought of daily life here:

Can you imagine dealing with this traffic every single day?

Oh my gosh, I’d die in this heat, and it’s only May—I don’t know how I endured August here for thirty years.

It’s gotten so hip and trendy to live here; let’s vow to not be one of “them.”

We preferred to live where landscapes were magnificent, streets weren’t as congested, and crowds didn’t flock like lemmings to wherever the latest publication listed as the Top Ten Most Exciting Places to Live. We wanted freedom to explore our surroundings, and we preferred to do it where mountains were tall and humidity was low, and preferably where it didn’t take all the live-long day to get out of town.

This is why we stunned ourselves by moving back to Austin.

On our trip around the world, Kyle and I kept the question of home in the backs of our minds and the forefront of our conversations. When a locale proved itself pleasing enough, we’d ask each other—Could we move here? Could this be home? If nowhere pulled strong enough, our default was a return to central Oregon. That was our assumption, in fact, until the last month of our journey.

In Uhldingen-Mühlhofen, Germany, Kyle and I went on that date to that pub, and along with talking about the kids and their year of nonstop travel, we talked about home. I don’t remember who brought it up first, but we shocked ourselves with a mutual admittance that of all the places in the world, we thought Austin might be calling us back. Late that night, we listened to drunk Germans sing in the background and we stared at lights reflecting over an inky-black Bodensee while we brainstormed what a return to Texas would look like.

Kyle said, “I don’t know why, but no matter where we are in the world, Austin has this magnetic pull. It’s like we’re supposed to be there.”

A month later, we got rid of another handful of our belongings waiting for us in a central Oregon storage unit, packed the rest in a truck, and signed a rental agreement in the north Austin suburbs.

We don’t know how long we’ll be here. We’re not Benedictine monks, and twenty-first-century life is what it is. But as our kids get older, we’re surprising ourselves with our unassuming, quiet draw to stability.

Austin’s traffic has only gotten worse, and all the queso in the world doesn’t quell my hatred for the refracting heat waves in the steaming summer air. Turns out, we didn’t move here for convenience, culture, or our taste buds. We moved here because of people. There were just enough old friends and just enough family to pull us back here, and together with the Anglican church we now attend with ardor (we’ve even been confirmed as official Anglicans), we’ve unearthed what we found in a sliver of a fraction in Thailand, Australia, and France: community.

This isn’t to say we didn’t make friends in Oregon. We managed to meet lovely people that we still enjoy visiting when we’re in the Pacific Northwest, and we hope to know them for a long time. We have family who live several hours’ drive away from our former central Oregon home, and we miss living in closer proximity to them too. But for whatever reason, it never became home. We loved living there, but our souls remained restless.

Author Terry Pratchett wrote, “Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.” This comforts me, here in Texas.

We will always travel. In fact, we’ve got more trips on the horizon, both scribbled on calendar squares and in daydreams for the kids’ teenage years. Our move to Texas was on the condition that we’d spend a sizable chunk of our summer months in Oregon, as much as we could help it.

Wanderlust is never truly quenched—as C. S. Lewis famously penned, “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”

The more I travel, the more I’m at peace with the unslakable satisfaction of wanderlust. Its very nature exists on the promise of something better around the bend, and the stamps in my passport have proved to me my heart will always yearn for something better. And better. And better, yet. It’s as though I were made for another world.

Am I at home in the world? Yes. Its waters and forests, megacities and villages, bus lines and bicycles make it feasible to find a reasonable escapade anywhere. When I travel, I’m at home in the world, so long as I’m with the people I love most.

But I still need a home in the world. I’ll backpack with gusto until my back gives out, but at the end of the day, I need to hang up that backpack in a closet, check my mail, and sip a drink with my next-door neighbor, watching the sun set from the backyard. I need to water my neighbor’s plant when it’s her turn to travel. I need to pick up my husband’s prescription refill from the pharmacy that already knows his needs. I need to harp on my kids to clean their rooms for the third day in a row. I need to lose my phone in the same couch, and stir soup simmering on the same stove in the same pot.

Merton continues about the Benedictine monks: “Stability becomes difficult for a man whose monastic ideal contains some note, some element of the extraordinary. All monasteries are more or less ordinary. Its ordinariness is one of its greatest blessings.”

Travel has taught me the blessing of ordinariness, of rootedness and stability. It can be found anywhere on the globe. It’s courageous to walk out the front door and embrace earth’s great adventures, but the real act of courage is to return to that door, turn the knob, walk through, unpack the bags, and start the kettle for a cup of tea. In our rituals of bread making and wine tasting, tucking our kids into bed and watching stars flicker from a chair on the back patio, we are all daring to find ourselves at home, somewhere in the world.