My Two-Cents: The Price of Something New
I read this quote the other day and thought it was good food-for-thought:
“You will never be completely at home again, because part of your heart will be elsewhere. That is the price you pay for the richness of loving and knowing people in more than one place.” – Miriam Adeney.
When we leave home, whether at 16, 18, 21, etc., the “home” we return to is never quite the same. I felt this the first time I pulled back into Sioux Falls after the first month of college – something seemed slightly awry. My now late dog Maggie was still waiting at the door for me. My siblings' and parents' lives continued without skipping a beat. Yet I felt odd. I noticed this feeling repeatedly throughout college – it often crept up on me from the northbound night skyline of 1-29 as I drove into town during college breaks. It lingered every summer break spent at home until it became background noise. I thought the inkling went radio silent. But then it hit me again one day from the opposite direction. I pulled out of my home driveway, heading to Lincoln for the start of my Junior year of college. As my dad stood waving goodbye from outside, standing in the same place until I reached the end of the street and couldn’t see him anymore, I felt the similar twinge I had felt pulling back into Sioux Falls two years ago. Then three hours later I pulled into Lincoln and felt like I had returned to my home base. In weird moments like this, you can feel the same polarity of the previous feeling but in the opposite direction. On the surface level, it felt as if my home base had shifted. But the more I fumbled around in my thoughts, the more I realized that it wasn’t my home base that had shifted, but the actual definition of what a home base was and felt like. That is the price of leaving home.
There is a price for finding a home in new places. As mentioned before: You will never be completely at home again, because part of your heart will be elsewhere. This is the richness of loving and knowing people in more than one place. Whenever I go to my first home, I find people that I love and know and care deeply about. Those factors are the intangibles, the things I first associated with home. What facilitated my operational definition of what a home base is. But my first home will never feel the same as it did when I was 18 – because the same rich feeling I feel towards the people in my first home I feel towards new people in new places! This consequence is a double-sided blade; it hurts to let go of what once was and accept it will never be the same, but it makes it all the more prevalent how lucky we are to get to know and love others. How lucky are we to be able to let our coffee go cold as we sit and talk on the porch. How lucky was I to be able to come down the stairs of my college house in the evening and hear my roommates laugh as they talked about their days. How beautiful are all the little simple and mundane things when you parse together how they let you get to know and love these people in the way you first learned to love those in your first home.
Now that I find myself in a new home again, I randomly catch myself thinking about how different my day-to-day is than what it was four months ago. I think about how the next time I go visit Lincoln, everything will physically be the same as when I left. (Minus the hopefully winning football team.) But somehow it’ll feel different to me, much like when I first returned home after college. Just as quickly as this saddens me, I notice a different vantage point – how lucky am I to be able to pay the price for the richness of loving and knowing people in more than one place? How lucky am I to get to experience it all — the good, the bad, the ugly — while shaving off little bits of my heart everywhere I go.
Now that I’ve done enough talking on what’s passed and what’s to come, I think it’s time to come back to right now. After all, I’m not done with right now! In fact, I was just starting to love it. Since I'm paying (mental) rent in multiple places, I'm going to get my money’s worth of this one. I want it to be somewhere I visit someday in my head and smile, knowing it’ll always be stored away in a file of my brain where I keep things I know and love deeply. Even if the place and its people all together don't physically exist anymore.
