Home is where the heart is…right? Well what if your heart is all over the world? Then would home be wherever your stuff is? Maybe you don’t have stuff, or are traveling with all of it. So would home be where your family lives? Sigh. Who knows. I suspect I have not found home yet; haven’t found one place where my heart is. But I fear that is an impossible feat, as I have dispersed little fractions of my heart on six different continents.
As I walked the streets of Toronto and the Daniels signage blatantly bawled my name, I had a profound realization: I don’t love where I live.
Don’t get me wrong, this is not a reflection on Los Angeles (so die-hard Angelenos, don’t get all riled up). Los Angeles is a beautiful city for the most part. There is nothing wrong with it. There is just something wrong with me in L.A. I have no spunk, no excitement, no free spiritedness when I am “home.” I don’t party with random strangers I can’t communicate with. I don’t try unfamiliar fruits from unfamiliar trees in the middle of the jungle. I don’t scale imposing mountain peaks at exceedingly high altitudes–okay, maybe I don’t do that anywhere, but that’s beside the point. Maybe I’d consider it if I was somewhere else. Wanderlust is a funny thing that way, it can really take over your life, make you do things you’ve never done and go places you’ve never been. I cannot love this place with all my heart because there is so much more in the world to love, and I want to go love it.
I want my return flights to land in a place that excites me as much as the one I have just departed from. I want every day, or at least most days, to be filled with the adventure that travel and new experiences bring. I want to be free and fun and happy all the time. I want to love where I live. And although this city where my stuff and my family are will by some definition remain “home” for the time, I don’t always have to live here.
Conclusion: You must love where you live and be your best self in that place. And if you can’t, then live everywhere; wander this land and find “home” wherever you choose to leave your heart.
