I have been thinking a great deal about home lately. Perhaps because we have just moved again, or perhaps because I am beginning to realise that the word home has never entirely meant to me what it seems to mean to many other people. For a long time, I think I assumed there would eventually be some final feeling of arrival; some place where I would suddenly know that this was it, that we had finally landed somewhere and life would simply continue unfolding around us in a quiet and steady way.
I am just no longer certain that I am built that way.
The strange thing is that my childhood was almost the complete opposite. I grew up in the same place, attended the same school throughout my childhood and all the way until high school, and there was a continuity to my early life that felt almost unquestionable. The same surroundings, the same streets, the same rhythms, the same feeling of always knowing where things belonged.
And perhaps that is precisely why the rest of my life has taken such a different shape.
Since becoming an adult, I seem to have moved through life in a way that almost follows its own quiet pattern. We have moved homes roughly every three to five years, and I have changed jobs in much the same way. Not because I was running away from something, and certainly not because what I was leaving behind was wrong. Quite the opposite, actually. Many of the homes and many of the jobs I have left were places and periods of life that I genuinely loved.
I think that is what makes it difficult to explain.
Because it is not dissatisfaction. I do not even think it is restlessness in the traditional sense. It feels more like a subtle movement that begins somewhere deep inside me long before I understand what it wants. A quiet sense that something is beginning to unfold, although I cannot yet see its shape.
Perhaps that is why I often feel most at ease in the process itself rather than after it. I have always loved the unfinished slightly more than I probably should. I love moving boxes, the strange emptiness of a new space before it becomes a home, the slow process of discovering where things belong and noticing how a place feels at different times of the day.
I have always loved that same feeling while travelling too. Malaysia, Valencia, Brazil, Los Angeles — often for months at a time. And perhaps part of what I love is that particular state of being where you do not entirely belong yet, but are no longer simply passing through either.
I remember the year we lived in London with our three children, and looking back now it may have been the place where I felt us most deeply together as a family. Not necessarily because the city itself was my favorit, but because there was something about that period that felt intensely alive and intensely us. As though we somehow moved closer together.
At the same time, it feels strange because I actually love homes. I love creating them. I love making spaces feel warm and lived in, filling them with books and photographs and objects that carry stories with them. I love dinners around a table, traditions, small rituals, and the quiet way a place slowly begins collecting memories over time.
And we always bring the same things with us.
The furniture moves with us. The books move with us. The photographs on the walls move with us. They are never replaced.
Neither are my people.
I have never felt the same urge to replace relationships as I sometimes have with places. Quite the opposite, actually. I think it may be one of the things that matters most to me. Having my tribe. People who have known me long enough to understand who I am, even while I continue changing directions. New people have entered my life over the years, but I have always held tightly to the ones who came before.
Perhaps because sometimes I think that is where my roots actually are.
Not in places. But in people.
And still, there is a sadness that appears sometimes. I find myself longing for places we once lived or jobs I once had. I can miss older versions of our lives with an intensity that almost feels physical, and at the same time I also know that this feeling will most likely return again here too, even though we moved in only two months ago and I already love being here.
That is perhaps the part I am still trying to understand.
And perhaps I think about it most when I look at our children. I wonder whether I have somehow passed on the same longing for movement, the same pull toward change, the same tendency to feel drawn toward what comes next before fully settling into what already is.
Or perhaps I have given them something entirely different.
Perhaps the feeling that home is not necessarily a place you find once and remain in for the rest of your life. Perhaps it is something you create, again and again.
Perhaps I have given them the courage to begin again.
I hope.