Opinion: The benefits of being a nomad

Tomorrow, I will sign a lease on a house for the 2011-12 school year.

My roommates and I are embarrassingly excited to engage in a domestic life, where we can coordinate draperies, prepare family dinners and put all our books together on one shelf.

For the first time since I have started college, I feel like I am settling in.

I beg of you not to think that this article will employ Dorothy’s uplifting cliche, “There’s no place like home.”

In fact, my views are rather antithetical of such.

The human impulse to define “home” for oneself creates our downfall in many situations, proving detrimental to our own self-development. The concept of home is so abstract and indefinite that it might as well be a fabrication of our own human invention, a misled illusion, a self-destructive enigma.

Now, humor me in the controversial nature of my tangent.

The term “home” has a denotative sense of permanency. A home is something that stays with an individual no matter where they go, thus the blasphemy, “home is where the heart is.”

Whether it lies in a person, place or state of mind, it’s a self-created comfort zone.

It’s funny to think that we are so prone to labeling a specific location as our home when Americans rarely stay in the same place their whole live.

Six million Americans alone live in mobile homes.

On average, a person from the U.S will change residence 11.7 times in his or her lifetime and about 9 of those times will be after they have turned 18.

About half of 18 to 22-year-olds live away from home and rarely come back, other than to visit. Of those students who go to college, study abroad rates have risen 150 percent in the last decade.  

Americans are nomads by nature. This is rather contradictory to our home-needing complex, as attaching to one locale disables us in adapting when we are inevitably called to relocate or change setting.

Take myself as an example. I was never the type that was excited to go to college, as leaving home roused my general dislike for change.

I first attended DePaul University before I transferred to IU last spring, and even when I got to this campus, I still didn’t like it.

Why? Because I couldn’t implicitly call anything “home.” I had been foiled into discontentment because of my own emotive need to be comfortable in a familiar place.

Last weekend, I re-watched the film “The Kids Are All Right,” a charming indie blockbuster about a married lesbian couple with two kids in a quaint home in Southern California.

The comfort of their house is horribly disrupted when their kids decide to contact their sperm donor, introducing a new member into the family.

The concept of a home is largely toyed with, as all conflict arises simply from shifting their domestic status quo.

The stability they had in their house caused a greater fall when they were forced to adjust into something less familiar.

I found myself looking back to the final scene, in which the daughter, Joni, is dropped off at college, and she asks her brother and moms to leave so she can have some independence in getting her dorm room ready.  

In the empty room, her reaction is brutally real as she hesitantly makes the bed, feigning she has any idea of what she is doing.

She looks back at her door, hoping her family will come back, but wanting to be independent and grown up all at the same time.

This paradoxical impulse returns. We take a few steps beyond what we know, and once we have left our cozy habitat, come running back to it.

As Thornton Wilder said, “It’s when you’re safe at home that you wish you were having an adventure. When you’re having an adventure, you wish you were safe at home.”

At this point in a student’s life, it is important to embrace that inner wanderlust. The ability to leave your home and not look back is of crucial importance.

Being attached to something that keeps you comfortable or consistent will inhibit your own ability to develop who you are and enter experiences that you are foreign to.

There lies a balance in getting settled into one dwelling with enough sensibility to know how to leave it again.

Next year, calling my house “home” might be a step in the wrong direction, but I know not to get too comfy, or readjusting will be hard when I have to start the cycle again and leave my little blue house on Grant Street.


E-mail: ftirado@indiana.edu