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.