and they 're absolutely right insofar as one hundred percent of my blood and ancestry does come from india except
i 've never lived one day of my life there i can 't speak even one word
and if where do you come from means where were you born and raised and educated
then i 'm entirely of that funny little country known as england except i left england as soon as i completed my undergraduate education and all the time i was growing up i was the only kid in all my classes who didn 't begin to look like the classic english heroes represented in our textbooks
and if where do you come from means where do you pay your taxes where do you see your doctor and your dentist
then i 'm very much of the united states and i have been for forty eight years now since i was a really small child except for many of those years i 've had to carry around this funny little pink card with green lines running through my face identifying me as a permanent alien i do actually feel more alien the longer i live
if where do you come from means which place goes deepest inside you and where do you try to spend most of your time then i 'm japanese because i 've been living as much as i can for the last twenty five years in japan
except all of those years i 've been there on a tourist visa and i 'm fairly sure not many japanese would want to consider me one of them
and i say all this just to stress how very old fashioned and straightforward my background is because when i go to hong kong or sydney or vancouver most of the kids i meet are much more international and multi cultured than i am and they have one home associated with their parents but
another associated with their partners a third connected maybe with the place where they happen to be a fourth connected with the place they dream of being and many more besides
and their whole life will be spent taking pieces of many different places and putting them together into a stained glass whole
home for them is really a work in progress it 's like a project on which they 're constantly adding upgrades and improvements and corrections
and for more and more of us home has really less to do with a piece of soil
some years ago when i was climbing up the stairs in my parents house in california and i looked through the living room windows and i saw that we were encircled by seventy foot flames one of those wildfires that regularly tear through the hills of california and many other such places
and three hours later that fire had reduced my home and every last thing in it except for me to ash
and when i woke up the next morning i was sleeping on a friend 's floor the only thing i had in the world was a toothbrush i had just bought from an all night supermarket of course if anybody asked me then where is your home i literally couldn 't point to any physical construction
my home would have to be whatever i carried around inside me
and in so many ways i think this is a terrific liberation because when my grandparents were born they pretty much had their sense of home their sense of community even their sense of enmity assigned to them at birth
and didn 't have much chance of stepping outside of that and nowadays at least some of us can choose our sense of home create our sense of community
fashion our sense of self and in so doing maybe step a little beyond some of the black and white divisions of our grandparents age no coincidence that the president of the strongest nation on earth is half kenyan partly raised in indonesia has a chinese canadian brother in law
the number of people living in countries not their own now comes to
two hundred and twenty million and that 's an almost unimaginable number but it means
and the number of us who live outside the old nation state categories is increasing so quickly by sixty four million just in the last twelve years that soon there will be more of us than there are americans already we represent the fifth largest nation on earth
and in fact in canada 's largest city toronto the average resident today is what used to be called a foreigner somebody born in a very different country
the real voyage of discovery as marcel proust famously said consists not in seeing
new sights but in looking with new eyes
and of course once you have new eyes even the old sights even your home become something different
many of the people living in countries not their own are refugees who never wanted to leave home
and ache to go back home but for the fortunate among us i think the age of movement brings exhilarating new possibilities certainly when i 'm traveling especially to the major cities of the world
the typical person i meet today will be let 's say a half korean half german young woman living in paris
and as soon as she meets a half thai half canadian young guy from edinburgh she recognizes him as kin she realizes that she probably has much more in common with him
constantly evolving mix of all those places
and potentially everything about the way that young woman dreams about the world writes about the world
thinks about the world could be something different because it comes out of this almost unprecedented blend of cultures where you come from now is much less important than where you 're going
and yet there is one
great problem with movement and that is that it 's really hard to get your bearings when you 're in midair some years ago i noticed that i had accumulated one million miles on united airlines alone you all know that crazy system six days in hell you get the seventh day free
i began to think that really movement was only as good as the sense of stillness that you could bring to it to put it into perspective and eight months after my house burned down i ran into a friend who taught at a local high school and he said i 've got the perfect place for you
really i said i 'm always a bit skeptical when people say things like that no honestly he went on it 's only three hours away by car and it 's not very expensive and it 's probably not like anywhere you 've stayed before
this was the wrong answer i had spent fifteen years in anglican schools so i had had enough hymnals and crosses to last me a lifetime several lifetimes actually but my friend assured me that he wasn 't catholic nor were most of his students but he took his classes there every spring
and as he had it even the most restless distractible testosterone addled fifteen year old
californian boy only had to spend three days in silence and something in him cooled down and cleared out he found himself and i thought
anything that works for a fifteen year old boy ought to work for me so i got in my car and i drove three hours north along the coast and the roads grew emptier and narrower and then i turned onto an even narrower path barely paved that snaked for two miles
up to the top of a mountain
and when i got out of my car the air was pulsing the whole place was absolutely silent but the silence wasn 't an absence of noise it was really a presence of a kind of energy or quickening
all around me were eight hundred acres of wild dry brush and i went down to the room in which i was to be sleeping small but eminently comfortable it had a bed and a rocking chair and a long desk and even longer picture windows looking out on a small private walled garden
and then one thousand two hundred feet of golden pampas grass running down to the sea
and i went out under this great overturned saltshaker of stars and i could see the tail lights of cars disappearing around the headlands twelve miles
to the south and it really seemed like my concerns of the previous day vanishing
and the next day when i woke up in the absence of telephones and tvs and laptops the days seemed to stretch for a thousand hours it was really all the freedom i know when i 'm traveling but it also profoundly felt like coming home
and i 'm not a religious person so i didn 't go to the services i didn 't consult the monks for guidance i just took walks along the monastery road and sent postcards to loved ones i looked at the clouds and i did
what is hardest of all for me to do usually which is nothing at all and i started to go back to this place and i noticed that i was doing my most important work there invisibly just by sitting still
and certainly coming to my most critical decisions the way i never could when i was racing from the last email to the next appointment
and i thought back to that wonderful phrase i had learned as a boy from seneca in which he says
that man is poor
not who has little but who hankers after more
and of course i 'm not suggesting that anybody here go into a monastery that 's not the point but i do think it 's only by stopping movement that you can see where to go and it 's only by stepping out of your life and the world that you can see what you most deeply care about
and find a home
and i 've noticed so many people now take conscious measures to sit quietly for thirty minutes every morning just collecting themselves in one corner of the room without their devices or go running every evening or leave their cell phones behind when they go to have a long conversation with a friend
movement is a fantasticprivilege and it allows us to do so much that our grandparents could never have dreamed of doing but movementultimately only has a meaning if you have a home to go back to
and home in the end is of course not just the place where you sleep
it 's the place where you stand thank you
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