I moved out at age four.

You may laugh but it’s true. I up and left home before I could even read. I took all my favorite things: my "Beauty and the Beast" bedding, my radio flashlight and my bug catching kit. With the world endless before my Sketchers light-up sneakers, I stepped through the threshold of the only home I had ever known.

I remember the thrill of being on my own with endless possibilities–the sun breaking through a grey sky and excitement filling my four-year-old body to the brim–until there was no room for fear.

Since then, I have left home and returned many times. I have lived alone and with hundreds of people in close proximity. I have rested my head in a ferryboat crossing the English Channel, hammocks during thunderstorms and upon the shoulders of many a friend. I have felt the sense of belonging and I have felt completely alone.

Chances are you are in a place of coming and going. Living out of boxes, packing up your car only to unload it again and tearing down what took so long to build. You’re buying plane tickets, transitioning friendships and relearning new environments and communities.

In some sense, we are drifters.

We move from place to place, with the intent of improving life, somehow perfecting comfort or pursuing rest in hopes that complete happiness is something that only a set of coordinates can yield.

What I have found in my drifting is that nothing could be farther from the truth.

Home is no longer a place for me; it is an idea that cannot be fully achieved now that I have spread pieces of my heart across this globe.

The idea of being completely satisfied in one location is only possible if you never explore what else is around the bend. By leaving, coming and all of the in between, you have opened up your heart to the reality that there is more.

There are people to challenge and encourage your hungry soul, there are places that will build and break your spirit and there are many things that you will abandon and discover. It is a great risk to leave, but do not neglect the reality that there is a vast risk in remaining as well.

I often feel homesick, homeless and humbled by the fact that I have no place to truly call mine on this earth. I wonder how long I will drift, how long my sense of adventure will hold out or how long it will be until I “settle down”. Yet I know that to trade those feelings and worries for comfort and a plan would ultimately be detrimental to my development as a human being.

It has been seventeen years since I first left home on my own. I have traded in my bug catching kit for a terrarium full of succulents. They follow me from place to place, a constant reminder of the home I left where they began growing so many years ago in my mother’s garden. My succulents and I, we will continue to drift and change. Keeping memories, facing fears and finding rest wherever we plant our roots.