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A Traveling Life
or, What I’ve learned from moving.
Many people have traveled more than I have, and to far more exotic places, yet when I tell people that I’ve moved roughly every 4 years since I was 9 years old, Im met with surprised dismay or excitement depending on whose doing the listening.
I never planned to move quite so often but so far I haven’t found exactly the spot that I want to live for the rest of my life. I may never find such a place and that’s also okay with me. Moving to a new town or a new state or even a new country has always felt like an opportunity for expansion and reinvention. I get the chance to start with a blank life ahead of me and to reinvest in the parts of my life that are truly important, while discarding the clingy bits that always seem to accumulate no matter how careful I try to be.
Creating a home-base in a new place lets me re-evaluate many areas of my life. It’s not that the opportunity to do that hasn’t been there all along, but when we move far away from a place we’ve come to call “home”, we are called to action in ways that I think can be harder to do when you stay in the same place all the time.
So far, I’ve lived in 9 states in 2 different countries: Rome, Italy (at two different times of my life). Washington, D.C., various towns in eastern Penna and New Jersey. Nyack, NY as well as in the heart of The…
