Wanderlust

Wanderlust

"... Human beings can't like life very much if they don't belong to a clan associated with a specific piece of real estate."- Kurt Vonnegut.

I read this last night in Fates Worse Than Death, a very excellent collection of essays and various literary detritus by Mr. Vonnegut, and it resonated somewhere deep inside me. Somehow I knew it was completely true, and yet in the same moment, began to evaluate who my clan was, and where they might reside. As you might expect, I came up with a variety of answers. My first thought of course was of my ethnicity, of Palestine and more specifically Ramallah, where all of my mother's family is from. But this is problematic for a variety of reasons, the two most important being that 1) I've never even been there, and 2) I have a lot of angst about "how Palestinian" (or not) I am. So while I have a connection to that space, I don't think it's my clan. There are my parents, but as my father frustratingly reminded me today, when I left Wichita, I never looked back. Not even once. So while my parents may be part of my clan, Wichita certainly isn't my hunk of real estate. There could be choir, where I can remind myself how much I love music, and pour so much of my energy, pain, hope and joy into the sound of voices moving together. There could be several people and locations that fit the bill in the Twin Cities, but nothing I can think of at the moment really pops out. So, does this mean that I am emotionally homeless?

I got to thinking about this further, and began to wonder if it was true for me right now. I am tetherless currently, winding down in St. Paul and about to move to Rhode Island, with a stop in Kansas along the way, I am placeless for the time being, and I'm actually ok with it. I'm relishing the freedom of not having a house or a spouse or even a car payment to tie me down to anything. I know eventually I will want a clan, but for now, I'm satisfying, or trying to satisfy my wanderlust. There is a part of me that wants desperately to be closer to my family again, and wonders when that will be, and if it will be. If my parents will eventually follow me from state to state much like my grandmother did to my mom, or whether it will just be visits on holidays or for summer vacation as my parents retire someplace beachy. It's almost too hard to think about, the idea that we will not be together, or within shouting distance again, so I try not to think about it. Of course that just starts this huge spiral of wondering why I have to leave, why I have to keep moving, why I'm so deathly, deathly afraid of stagnating or staying in one place. Settling down seems terrifying to me, but will I be like the grasshopper that sang all summer? Will I one day wake up and wonder what happened to having a marriage and a family? I definitely don't want that to happen...

In the end I think I have to keep moving. It's something in me that pushes me on, the same thing that took my grandmother half way across the world to be the first woman in her family to come to the United States, and for a job, no less! It's the same sense of adventure that made my dad enlist in the Navy so he could see the world. And it's the same thing that pushed my mother farther and farther in pursuing her childhood goal of being a lawyer: it's ambition mixed with curiousity. It's the very human desire to see what's just on the other side of the horizon. Once you lose that desire, I think you lose a part of yourself that makes you human.