For many people, packing up a suitcase and traveling to a new place is a rare occurrence. On top of that, it's usually followed by unpacking that suitcase and settling into their new surroundings. For me, neither of these things are true. My parents divorced when I was 11, setting off a weekly cycle of packing my life into a suitcase and moving. Though the places didn't vary (much), I never quite saw the appeal of unpacking only to do it all over. Instead I would keep everything as it was, in my suitcase. This became my life. Never grounded and always wondering when my next switch would be.
When I got to college, this all changed. For the first time in a long time, I was living in one place for an extended period of time. Unpacking everything was one of the greatest experiences I had out of my freshman year! Though I didn't know what the year held in store, I felt secure in the fact that I wasn't going anywhere for at least a semester. For once I could finally put my suitcase on the shelf and forget about it. And forgot about it, I did. Falling into the routine of college life, I quickly lost the feeling of impermanence that dominated my life. Though I could never quite call college home, it was the next best thing. I was able to keep this wonderful feeling of being grounded until the end of the year, when I once again packed up my life and headed out, this time to a new house that my dad got in California.
Though my collection of stuff has grown a bit, I am still confronted by the feeling that I don't have roots in any particular place. This house is just the first stop in a summer-long journey that will take me across the world and back. So the questions remain: where do I live? Where's home? My working answer is an age-old refrain: Home is where the heart is. I'm making every attempt to see my family throughout the summer. When I say family, that includes my friends and loved ones. Though I've moved away from my hometown, I'm going back to say "Hi," and recapture all the great things about high school. I'm traveling the world, too, flexing my new-found freedom in an epic European adventure.
If there's anything that this saga of suitcases has taught me, it's that a place to live only ties you down. If I'm always ready to move, I can be responsive to the crazy changes that life throws at each and every one of us. I've learned to travel light too: how many of you can say that your life will fit in a suitcase? Most importantly, I've learned to prioritize. Not everything fits in a suitcase or in your life, and it's our jobs to know what's worth packing and what we should just give away.
