Home

“And I’ll spread my wings

And fly away

To a place that I long for

And my heart will be, the pathway

I’m searching for a love that’s ever more…”

-   Troop, “Spread My Wings”, 1990

It’s not exactly classified information that I absolutely abhor that one quite pervasive small-talk question:  “So Adam, where is home for you?”  Most Americans live within fifty miles of where they grew up – the environs with which they emotionally, socially and culturally identify – and for them, the question is a rather trifling one.  For me, on the other hand, the very question of “home” is intimately related to some nagging philosophical debates that I, as a twenty-something, have yet to fully and adequately answer for myself.

I hate the question because, while it truly is nothing more than small-talk for most Americans, for me it entails a full-blown discussion of my entire social and geographical history.

Is home that awful place, outside of Tallahassee, that I never chose to live in, always hated, never identified with, was firmly rejected by, have not spent any significant time in since 2005, and to which I maintain zero social and family connections?  Is home the place where I spend my Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays with a decent chunk of my mother’s family – even though in the proper sense of the word I have never really lived there as an adult?  Is home a more temporal thing, defined at any given point by the cities – Gainesville, Houston, Fort Lauderdale, Pittsburgh, and now New York City – in which I have lived by my own volition?  Or for me – a highly mobile, career-driven professional who has lived in a different residential building each year since 2005 – is home something to be defined in the future, some place in which I will settle down and build roots lasting many decades?

Today, as I make final preparations to relocate to New York City from the Miami area, I certainly do not have the answer to that perennially nagging question.  And although being asked that question at upcoming professional networking events will, as usual, produce a strong desire to quickly down another Grey Goose on the rocks, a part of me cannot help but think that this is an optimal outcome given the current set of facts.  I could quite possibly be wrong, of course.

You see, because I in fact spent such a large chunk of my formative years in an environment that I completely loathed and with which I never identified, the word “home” has always had rather high emotional barriers attached in my personal dictionary.   Because I knew early on that my future life would in no way be attached to this parental-imposed “home” location, the word has always been imbued with a certain degree of malleability and transience – the belief that your parents and family do not have the luxury of arbitrarily imposing an indelible “home” identity on their children and relatives.   Other people – it would seem, most Americans - go through life perfectly content to define their lives around the place where they just so happened to be born.  It is the place – or it becomes the place, through their conscious adult choices – that defines their values, their culture, their lifestyle habits, their family roots, the entire nexus of their identity in many ways.   That was never, and will never, be the case with me.

If I can one day answer the “where is home?” question with no shades of ambiguity, it will likely be because I have arrived at a fixed “home” that meets my (admittedly demanding) level of comfort with the term.  It will be a place that defines me, much as Chicago defines Barack Obama.  It will likely be a place in which I will have established firm roots and a strong cultural identity, a vibrant social network and an unshakable community bond.  

Today, there is no such place in my life – and in a peculiar sort of way, I’m perfectly fine with that.  Will New York, long one of my favorite cities in the world, step up to fulfill that role?  Will the very manner in which I frame the question of “home” change as I grow older and wiser?  Only time will provide answers.  Until then, as I prepare to embark on yet another chapter – here’s to the journey of discovery itself, even if the questions it imposes are quite uncomfortable at times.