Redefining “Home” — Reflections on 7 Years as an International Nomad
Devon, United Kingdom train station (photo: Roxanne Patruznick)
I don’t have a home to go back to. I’m not on vacation where travel is built around the bookends of home. Living nomadically, I travel from place to place, moving forward. I don’t need a place to go back to, because home is where I’m at. In a sense, I’m always home.
It’s easy to think of home as the place we return to. A base. A foundation. When I went to college, even though I never had any intention of moving back to the farm where I grew up, I still considered it my home. My college apartment felt as temporary as a tent on a camping trip. Like I was between homes, the place I grew up and the place I’d end up.
After my dad passed away, the house where I grew up no longer felt like home. I realized that home wasn’t the building or the farm or the town. Home was my dad. I kept the house for a little while, mostly because I didn’t know what else to do with it. I knew I wasn’t going to move back. I am a lot of things, but a farmer isn’t one of them. When I finally sold the house, it didn’t feel like the end of something as much as it felt like an acknowledgment that something had ended sometime earlier.
Sarajevo, Bosnia (photo: Roxanne Patruznick)
Not everyone is mentally built to be a nomad. That’s okay, of course. Apart from all the practical reasons why it might not work for someone (work, kids, etc.), it takes a certain kind of mindset. While I’m fortunate that my work allows me the freedom to be anywhere in the world, I’m also built for this kind of life. Some people need more security. Some people require assurance and a sense of certainty. Some people need a home to go back to.
My home isn’t a place I’m going to return to, but home is wherever I’m at. Because that’s where my wife is and that’s where my life is in that moment. So, essentially it took seven years for me to figure out that “home is where the heart is.” But to be fair, I’m kind of a dope. Also, you can’t always trust an aphorism. “Out of sight, out of mind” rides shotgun with “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”
When it comes to being a nomad, I can only really speak to traveling with a partner. Doing this kind of thing solo has a whole different dynamic. While I’ve traveled alone and we’ve been apart for a month at a time on occasion, the bulk of our travel time is together. It doesn’t mean that traveling as a couple isn’t without its challenges, just that traveling alone is a different animal.
Tbilisi, Georgia view from our apartment (photo: Roxanne Patruznick)
It makes it easier that my wife and I have been together for over 30 years. We know each other pretty well, to say the least. I would never have such a strong sense of home if it wasn’t for her. Like my dad represented home in the past, now she’s my home. While I didn’t intend for this to be a love letter to my wife and a treatise on how lucky I am that we can be on this journey together, what can I say, it’s the truth. After all, every traveler is a romantic at heart.
That doesn’t mean that I can’t get lonely or homesick. Although homesickness can be the stepcousin of nostalgia. I miss my friends and family, but if I admitted it, I didn’t see them that often when I was living in one place. My friends are scattered throughout the world. I can’t always see the ones I’m thinking about, but I’m never too far away from a friend.
Writing this in Prospero’s Books in Tbilisi, a city I’ve lived in for the last four months, I’ve met dozens of new people that I now call friends. People I will miss when I leave but look forward to seeing when I return. From here, I’ll head to Budapest, a city where I have friends that I’m looking forward to seeing. And I’ll miss them when I leave and look forward to seeing the people in the next place I travel. And so on, from one home to the next home and beyond.
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- written by Johnny