Going Home
Building What You Can Never Find, Letting Go of What You Could Never Keep
“The ache for home lives in all of us.”
“Let your home be your mast and not your anchor.”
There are few things in life so frequently thought of as being permanent, even eternal, that so readily subvert our expectations as the idea of home. Anyone who has lost a parent in youth, individuals who have walked through a divorce or struggled to stay connected with their children following a separation, or those who simply find themselves in a radical season of change due to financial or relational upheaval, understand this all too well.
It's been articulated by many, probably most notably by the great twentieth century author Thomas Wolfe, that you can never go home again. Believe me, I can relate. My childhood home is now a pawnshop and a car dealership. I returned with my son a number of years ago to show him where I first grew up, to share my joys and memories, to give him a glimpse of where my brothers, my sister and I built forts, shot BB guns, hunted for snakes, hacked our way through the woods, theorized about local Bigfoot sightings, and generally made the most of an expansive property in the heart of the free-roaming 1980s. Imagine my grief-stricken soul when the fields and walkways of my youth were strewn about with various automobiles, fitness equipment, and idling customers. My front yard is a parking lot. The lawn where I played in the sprinkler, nibbled on honeysuckle pods, prepared to build a snowman with our mother, and once rode my plastic, red and yellow tricycle, stark naked down the sidewalk at top speed in midsummer…because hey, again, it was the 80s and I was two…this same patch of lawn now serves those looking for a sweet deal on a used Honda or a burned out Caddy.
Still, this difficult pill is something I have returned to frequently over the past few years. So often, we simultaneously accept and reject this fact. We know that existence continues to shift, moment by moment, year after year. But there is a room within each of us where the sacred idea of home and the immovable reality of days gone by meet to form a stubborn model of that forever longed for place. That place, we believe, where joy runs freely, and where all strife might finally cease.
Each of us longs for, and is in fact, built for seeking some notion of home. You could say that we've been looking for it since the moment we emerged naked and crying from our mother's womb, perhaps wishing that we had not left the warmth and protection of her body. Our unconscious longing for home, for what it can be for us, continually changes over the course of our lives. Early on, we find home in our father's first strong look into our eyes, every time we latched onto our mother's breast and drank from the cup of life. We find home in the familiarity of the first house we lived in, within the explorations and mad tumbling with our brothers and sisters. We find it in food, in tradition, in customs and patterns, in all the subtle and innumerable sounds, sights, and smells that make up the protean ineffability of youth.
Later, usually in our early twenties, we begin to stretch out further into the world and the pursuit of home takes a back seat to our pursuit of expansion and experience. Still, even then, behind the endless nights and new experiences, unconsciously, our definition of home broadens. We find it in our closest friends, in certain teachers and mentors. We find aspects of it in the camaraderie of our sports teams and creative groups, in religious affiliations, work associates, and the deep bonds formed during military service. We find pieces of it in a host of relationships. We uncover it in hundreds of deep conversations, in gut-destroying, soul-healing bouts of shared laughter, in too many places to count that are too important to relinquish. And of course, eventually, if we are fortunate enough, we learn to build a home of our own in the vast, shifting frontier that is love, marriage, and parenthood.
Yet, even within all our manifestations of love, in every tether that holds us even faintly to one thing or another, to one person or place or season, there is a truth that continues to haunt us, that life and time do not hesitate for a moment. Everything and everyone changes, and because of this, we must continually redefine our conception of home. This unspoken demand from existence is no minor thing to contend with. We usually weather it fairly well but I think it takes a greater toll on us subconsciously than we realize. For, no matter how successful or lucky we are in this life, there will always be a gap between what we dream about and long for, and what is actually available and attainable.
The allure of history with its unchangeable realities and the sweetness of memory it engenders, forever begs us to look backward, asking that we demand of the present what the past has already delivered and can no longer guarantee. Those seasons were beautiful, terrible, wonderful, ecstatic, profound. But they will never exist again. We will find new beauties, new struggles, new ecstasies, but nothing will ever repeat itself. We can get the old crew together for more good times, for continued friendship, but the old crew will not be the same as they once were. The connections we now share will be different than they were in years gone by. Each of us has changed too much, filtered too much of life through our blood and spirit for things to remain fixed. The dynamic nature of friendship or any relationship can feed and energize us as long as we are willing to welcome the transitory nature of existence as a fact of our time here and not as an enemy. Too many friendships go down the tube because one or both parties refuse to embrace change as an essential aspect of their bond. The act of remembrance is a wonderful thing, a storehouse of truths and experiences that no one can alter or erase. And nostalgia is an occasional healing distraction. But living there, inside those memories, inside a fixed idea of home, can be devastating.
In October of 1959, during the Twilight Zone's inaugural season, creator and writer Rod Serling gave us one of the show's most memorable episodes, Walking Distance. In this story we find New York advertising executive Martin Sloan out for a long Sunday drive in the hope of relieving his mounting work stress and the dissatisfaction he feels with his place in the world. During a stop at a roadside service station for an oil change, he notices a sign across the street, signaling a town aptly called Homewood, just a mile and a half up the dirt road. It turns out this was where Martin grew up. And given that it's only a short walk, he decides to make the trek.
Being part of the Twilight Zone, the episode naturally takes a turn for the unnatural. Upon arrival, Martin begins to notice small details that at first seem little more than oddities, like the price of a chocolate soda, familiar faces, and the way almost nothing seems to have changed in the decades since he'd left. Through a series of interactions he comes to realize that it isn't Homewood of the present, but the exact town of his boyhood that he's stepped into. Martin has traveled back in time.
He shares a brief conversation with his younger self. Though thankfully, the boy does not know who he is talking to and subsequently runs away believing the man to be chastising him for carving his name into a gazebo. Martin also pays a few visits to his parents, who unsurprisingly believe him to be a lunatic. He wants to turn back the clock or at least to find his younger self and warn him, to save the boy from certain disappointments and to stress to the child the importance of making the most of his youth. Eventually, his father realizes the truth and comes to find him. Martin is beside himself with longing, longing for the past, for childhood, for simpler times and the unspoiled joy of a perfect summer.
One of the more interesting writing choices that Serling makes is the way he plays the father in this scene. The man is calm, compassionate, full of empathy for his grown son but he makes no additional allowances for the man. He doesn't let Martin stumble and lose himself in a haze of nostalgia. He connects with Martin about his genuine desire to relive youth but reminds the man that he has already made his choices. And he pleads with Martin to not rob his younger self of that same liberty. He asks him to not talk with the boy again, to not share the boy's perfect summer, lest he spoil the innocence and sanctity of youth and the limited pleasures each of us experiences throughout the course of our life.
His father wants to protect his child from an excess of premature knowledge, to let him experience things naturally, to grow and choose according to his own desires and perceptions. He acknowledges his adult son's pain and desire but doesn't linger or ask him to stay a while and share time together, something which I know I'd be more than tempted to do had I met my son's adult self when he was still a boy. As every good father should strive for, he urges Martin to stop looking into the past for answers, and instead, toward the present and future, believing that life can still hold promise and discovery for him.
Martin's conception of home had remained fixed. It had not changed sufficiently with the seasons of his life. He'd achieved considerable success and lived through myriad experiences but had not made room for fashioning a new and still beautiful model of home that, while it was sure to look different than what he'd believed it should be, could shelter no less of the sacred within its walls. The essence here is that each season of life has its purpose. We must neither allow the past to restrain us from the future, nor let the theoretical visions of the future rob us of our present.
It is true, we cannot go home again, not to the empty rooms of our youth where only the specters of memory now haunt. Not to that first or best love and its exalted days and nights. Not to that surprise first meeting with a dear friend where we learned of shared truths and plotted to change the world together. Not to the first time we heard our favorite song, discovered our favorite film, hiked that unforgettable trail with one of the best individuals in our life. Not to that amazing vacation or to summer camp. For many of us, not to our parents still being together, or our mother, father, brother, sister, or friend still walking the earth. Not to the unspoiled forest, the perfect road trip, the sublime kiss. Not to our child's first breath, first word, first step. Not to any immovable but now untouchable moment in history. But is that such a crime against our heart and spirit? Would it not be a greater crime if life never changed? I sometimes long for it too, the sweetness of the past. But not at the cost of my future, not at the risk of losing a clear view and a firm grasp on today. I have been there before, lost down the memory hole of regrets and past joys. It's an interesting and enlightening ride but not a road to stay on for long.
Home is, indeed, where we place the most valued things and people in our lives, hopefully where we feel most like ourselves and at peace. Spending too much time looking for an old conception of home reveals something uncomfortable, that there is a strong chance we don't have a true home right now. This isn't wrong but it is sad and it is difficult to admit. Most human beings experience various passages of statelessness throughout their lifetime, a handful of wandering seasons where few things in life seem bolted to the floor and everything is in flux. The question to ask, though, is whether we are in this place because of natural occurrences or because we have avoided building the connections, the intimacy, and the infrastructure, both physical and spiritual, to establish a new architecture for home.
This question is somewhat loaded for anyone whose memories of childhood and home were anything but peaceful, whose experiences of family were chaotic, even traumatic. In this case, we generally spend most of our energy not looking for home but running from it. If we're lucky, we come to see that running so hard away from something only solidifies our obsession with and our fear of the same. Eventually, through time and personal work, through good counsel and the revealing comfort of friendship, through painful choices, through forgiveness, and through no small measure of anger, sorrow, and release, we can make room within for the landscape of home and intimacy. This process is unique to each of us. And the more we open up about it with those we trust, the greater chance we have of making space for this new spiritual and emotional conceptualization of coming home.
The real tragedy is not that home will never look and feel exactly the same as we remember it, but that we have not allowed within our heart and mind, the willingness to receive and the will to act upon the potential for a different and better home. The home of yesterday made us ready for what is before us today, just as the lessons of youth sharpen us until we are ready to take the reigns of life within our own hands. The shared memories of years past are gems and they are irrevocable. But they have readied us for the experiences only now taking shape. To waste those lessons by refusing to create something new is heartbreaking.
Home may be a kind of temple. But it is a portable one. It is a moveable feast and we can will it into being by moving toward instead of away from others. We can fashion it by making hard choices that lead toward intimacy instead of alienation. And we can find it once more, again and again and again, if we acknowledge the beauty and potential of its changing face.