Home and Away
We sink roots in one place - home - only to realize that we are by nature, rootless, relocatable beings that do not always bloom where we are planted.
Are you the same person on holiday as you are at work? At the pub and at a funeral? Of course not. It’s obvious that the situation - the immediate environment and the people in it - have enormous power to amplify or mute parts of who we are. What’s less obvious is how deeply we are affected by our long-term environment, the place we call home.
Everything that makes up home - language, weather, people, cuisine, culture, economy - becomes fundamental to who we are. Home is where we form our idea of reality, where we decide what is normal, what is good and evil, what is beautiful, even what is sacred.
“No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main…”
- John Donne
To illustrate: stop for a second and think about who you might be if you lived in Paris.
Forget all the practicalities like what you would do for work and where the kids would go to school and imagine freely who you could be. Do you eat the same food? Wear the same clothes? Do you have the same hobbies? Read the same books, watch the same movies? Get up at the same time? Do you feel more or less stressed? Anxious? Are you happier? Do you have the same partner? Are you more or less the same or borderline unrecognizable?
Most people agree that they would be at least somewhat different if they lived somewhere else. Some think they would be utterly miserable if they left their hometown. Others can’t wait to set sail for a new place, seeing home as an anchor to throw off as soon as they can. Underneath all this hypothetical wandering is an unsettling truth.
Who we are depends on where we are.
What a terrifying thought.
Somewhere out there in the world of possibility, another me didn’t write this. Another me was too busy tending to the farm, another me was watching the opera or running for sport. Another you isn’t reading this, either. Another you is out salsa-dancing, snorting cocaine or diving a wreck. Hopefully not simultaneously.
These alternate versions of us are not far-fetched philosophical thought experiments, but flesh-and-blood people that could exist if we sold up and moved to rural India or Berlin or the Indonesian Archipelago. If who we are depends on where we are, then where we end up calling home is of immense existential importance.
Yet where we end up - home - is often less choice and more accident. We end up settling down in the country we were born, often near our parents, where our native language is spoken and the food is never too spicy. We stay because we find a job, or a partner, or because we like the way the wind blows and the sun shines.
A few pluck up the courage to migrate overseas or uproot their lives to a totally new place. But most of us, myself included, use travel to dabble in the vastness of the world instead. You don’t need to go far to get a sense of how much you could change if you moved to another place. A weekend getaway spent driving the potholed roads out to a country town is enough to remind us that life could be otherwise, that who we have become in our familiar domestic bubbles might be more a coincidence of suburb than an authentic reflection of a deeper self.
To tease this point out further, let’s go together on a long drive to Gin Gin and notice what feelings arise.
Before loading up the sensible sedan, a suburbanite packs a rolling suitcase. The most important item in a suburbanite's luggage is the phone charger. The phone is the only tether to what’s left behind. A chime links us back to home, a real-time feed of what’s happening: perhaps a delivered package, or a work email, an event at the local café, or the news a friend from school got married.
If the phone battery dies, so too does our connection to the pressures and pleasures of home. Emails, messages and notifications cease: no more reminders of incomplete tasks, domestic minutiae or conflict with colleagues. Groups where we are important and connected - friends, family, workplaces - can no longer reach us. We end up out of the loop: a good place to be if you’re interested in finding out how you cope once the reminders of who you were fall silent.
As the city dwindles in the rear-view mirror, the mind turns inward and begins to adjust its seat. Cars peel off the highway, one by one, retiring to garages, roast dinners and the scandals of the 6 o’clock news. I drive on, occasionally passing a truck or caravan, but mostly alone. I pass the first town: Gympie.
It has a McDonalds, an Aldi and traffic lights, just like home. But that’s about it for big brands. The rest of the local businesses are clumped on one road - the butcher is next to the baker, next to the produce shop, next to the saddlery - just moments after passing the welcome sign, you’re at the exit: Thank You for Visiting Gympie.
With so little to choose from, you wonder how anyone enjoys living here. But live they do, with less, and without the burden of choice that torments the suburban homemaker.
Asking a city-dweller where to go for dinner involves a complex calculus of preference, social desirability, proximity, availability, trendiness, cost and ease of parking.
Ask a Gympie resident where to go for dinner and they’ll ask whether you want Chinese or Fish and Chips - made by the same guy. As I drive on, a question pops up: what might I be in a place with less? Is this place missing anything I can’t live without? Having known such retail utopias as Westfield and Queen Street Mall, am I forever wedded to needing galleries of consumer choice? If I lived here, would I get bored with the same options and leave to find more shops, more dining, more of everything? Does the thought of less appeal to me? Why or why not? It’s another couple of hours until the next town, so I think on it a bit.
The sequined road markers flit past in hypnotic rhythm, a brief starburst of direction along the pitch dark road. I am too far from home now - if my house caught fire all would be ash before I got back.
Yet, this does not trigger panic. Rather, being so far away allows me to assess with cold objectivity what matters. Physical distance fosters psychological distance.
It dawns on me that everything I need, everything I am and could be is sitting right here, in the seat of a fuel-efficient coupe with chip crumbs on its pants. The rest may burn. It is harrowing to reconcile how much effort we spend sinking roots in one small place, decorating a mortgage with trappings of the self, only to realize, on a drive to the country, that we are by nature rootless, relocatable beings that do not always bloom where we are planted.
The next questions jolt like a riders spur:
Would I be better in this happy, quiet town?
If my house burned down, would I rebuild in the same place, or move far away, perhaps back to this town or the next?
Should I light the match myself or wait for lightning to strike?
Out here, my anxieties are fewer. Less traffic. No sirens or thunderous aircraft. Nosy neighbors have acres between them. Twenty minutes can go by without passing a building, a car, or any proof of others. City promises lay dead as wallabies on rural bitumen, flattened by the sheer distance between you and them.
The monotony of long roads crowds out everything but the next stop. All I see is what is laid directly in front of me: a home-baked pie, a rusted windmill, a crooked fence, a blond Palomino sprawled under the shade of a lonely tree.
I imagine what it would be like if I never went back to my tangled home ambitions. I’d take on smaller, organic concerns like how to collect rainwater, or how to pluck the sourdough out of the oven just in time. Walking by the local real estate office, I peer in the window, picturing my family in a quaint cottage with heritage fretwork, greeted each night by a squeaky wrought iron gate, where the brick chimney puffs handsomely each July and the postman knows my name, and I know his.
It’s Jim, by the way, he’s lovely and his wife runs the news agency.
I drive on.
A continuity has been broken. Between the part of our experience that sets us in nature, as one of its creatures and subject to its laws and changes, and that other part where we exist as social and economic units, consumers.
What has got lost in the break is much that once belonged to our direct sensory experience - the glow of a ripe peach behind leaves, the first blades of green in a furrow, the feel under our hand of the bristles on the back of a hog, the dance of threads in a hand loom; but much, too, of our sense of the world as a place of teeming variety and growth…
On Experience, David Malouf
I was invited to Gin Gin for a wedding held on top of a farmers hill. I skipped the township and went out to greener pastures.
It rained all day, breaking several months of drought but turning the picturesque hill into a muddy slope. The air tasted of clotted earth, wooden spindles once twined with fence wire became cocktail tables, and the bride's family had a tractor on standby for the city cars that got bogged.
The bar was improvised by a few good men and their utes, who threw open their canopies, filled the trays with ice, laid out a grey gum slab on two rusty barrels and started handing out beer with a wink and a no worries mate.
The wedding was a disaster by suburban standards - the music cut out, the dress was soaked in brackish water and the father of the bride opted for a flannel shirt and jeans over a jacket and tie. Everyone was caked in sludge and everyone was happy. The rain retreated as the pastor spoke of God, love and the road ahead with the clouds returning in time to bless the newlyweds first dance: the Nutbush.
Unlike the manicured gardens and chandeliers of a city wedding, the country way of celebrating love seemed to spring out of the earth like the sugarcane fields around it; sweet, strong, natural. Farmers wake before dawn, so festivities wrapped up just after 9pm and I headed back to a hotel the next town over.
They inhabited a world where ideas and images of nature, of animals and plants, of drought, flood, fire, storm, birth, death, growth, and decay were born not of abstraction but of experience.
Their encounters with the world were not mediated by philosophical idealism, by language, or by economics, but directly felt through bodies in a material world. Sun burnt on their faces, sweat trickled across their brows, heat and cold seeped into their bones, rain splattered on their skin, dust filled their nostrils.
The arresting smell of sun on wet, hot rock fixed their beings in the here and now.
- Open Air Essays, William J Lines
The next morning, I loaded up and started driving home. The trip back, though equal in time and distance and passing through the same places, is entirely different. The trees thin out slowly, making way for buildings and billboards and powerlines. Two lanes become four, then six, thickening until ten lanes, each crammed with cars, choke out the landscape.
Driving feels heavy. Each landmark is a weight you left behind finding its perch on your shoulders again. It feels sad to see quiet lose to loud, simplicity fall to chaos, friendly waves turn to hostile anonymity. The drive home from the country is like a flipbook of pretty towns gradually marred by industry and overpopulation.
At some point, a surge of sadness rises up. For me, this is usually on passing some mega-sized petrol station with four fast food chains attached.
The feeling is not quite regular melancholy because it has a specific grief: coming to terms with returning to the suburbs. It feels like I am mourning the death of an alternative self - a better self, the self I might be if my home was back there, in bucolic bliss, surrounded by dirt roads and hobby farms.
So I put two words together - melancholy and bucolic.
Melancholy - a state, episode or mood of pensive or meditative sadness.
Bucolic - relating to the pleasant aspects of the countryside and country life.
To make a new word, bucolia:
Bucolia - a state, episode or mood of pensive or meditative sadness triggered by leaving pleasant aspects of the countryside and country life.
I finally have a word for the deep, mournful feeling that strikes on the long drive home from the country as hopes of another self - a better self - fade away. Bucolia.
Wanting to turn around, send new roots into the nourishing earth, is bucolia. Wishing you lived back there, someplace between the mud and the rusted windmill, where another you waves to the postman and sips earl grey tea at sunrise, is bucolia. Dreaming on selling up the suburban dream to build a chicken coup on a patch of land out west is bucolia.
Bucolia, like all minor crises is remedied by distraction. The highway always delivers a double dose: clogged arterial roads filled with angry drivers and billboards for erection pills steal my attention away from remembering who I could be if I turned around and drove back to buy that farmhouse. Distraction keeps me from the stinging knowledge that I might be better somewhere else - that the suburb that coincidence chose might limit who I am and can become. Distraction is a palliative that must be administered regularly to dull the pain of continued, burdensome choice.
If I have kept your attention this far, distraction has not conquered you just yet. Perhaps the feeling of bucolia I describe resonates with you. Perhaps you keep wondering what it might be like to live in Paris, or move to the big city, or out to a little town.
I’m not about to tell you to throw it all away and head to the countryside. Life has a way of getting heavier, gathering moss the longer it stays plonked in one place. Wrestling with inertia is no easy task. But we should ask how much of us is muted where we are and how we could be amplified by a new place.
Don’t sell up just yet. Pay attention to your feelings when you’re moving from place to place. Keep imagining how a new place might draw out a different you. And if you get that creeping feeling that a better you is waiting in the countryside, perhaps start thinking about making that move.
If who we are depends on where we are, then we have to careful where we end up.
PS. I am very excited about an upcoming article on the phenomena of real estate and the twisted way we view property. Keep an eye out.
PPS. If you spot a typo (let’s pretend I leave them in for fun) then by all means reply and I will fix it up for the web version.
Hi Tyson. Your title caught my eye as my field of research is the psychology of home and how we attach to people and places. https://findinghome.substack.com/
And your piece does indeed resonate with me. I've lived most of my life in cities but I was born in the country and bought my first home in the country, where I loved living for over a decade, but now I'm back in a city again. And longing for the country...
Bucolia - a wonderful word. Thank you for that. If I ever use it, I'll give you credit.
Elements of this reminded me of a question you've asked before (in whichever recent economic downturn) about "whether you lost your job whether you'd look again for the same thing?" And if not, then why don't you light the match yourself, so to speak.
Also, I feel we could all do with a few more genuinely charming country weddings like that :)