Home

A glance around my room illuminates a whole panoply of things I've come to love. I love the way the trees outside my window rustle in the wind and change color on the onset of fall. I love the occasional bark of a dog in the small field that sits just within my view. I love the way my books sit on my shelves, ordered just the way I like, accompanied by a whole world of trinkets and treasures I picked up somewhere far away. I love my bar cart, and the nice booze that sits on it, which of course includes a bottle of single malt, perfect for pouring into a glass on a cold night while I watch the snow. I love the yellow chair I sit in with the scotch. I love the quotes pinned to my cork board. I love the magnates and photos on my fridge. Mostly, I love the feeling of peace and confidence that comes waking up in the morning and slowly looking around at a place that exists on my terms, and embodies my 30 years, everything finally together in one place.

The surprise probably comes greatest of all to me, watching the nature of my life change so rapidly in its day to day movements after years spent on the road - and welcoming it. That previous life was full of beautiful people and places. It was exciting and always new. Yet, as I came to recognize, it was fleeting, and built atop something more vacuous, more image than reality, masquerading itself in the exotic allure of a dozen different countries. It was something I knew I would find disappointing years down the road looking back, examining all the difficult choices I failed to make against all the things that were easy to do. I often feel inspired on my morning commute, one which takes me past the White House and old buildings with marble columns, the Washington Monument always visible in the distance. Something in that I view as evidence, usually on the harder days, that many of my observations were true. I expect they will become more true with time.

Antoine de Saint-Expurey, writing to a friend in Wind, Sand, and Stars, said that moral greatness derives more from a sense of responsibility than from courage or honesty. To be a man is, precisely, to be responsible. I think there is great power that comes with this sense of responsibility, assuming it around the small confines of your world, and not relying on anyone else to make things happen. Being a man, to be sure, requires sacrifice (I sometimes feel I've sacrificed it all in my attempt to keep true things, true). But there is beauty in that sacrifice, in that struggle, in the imperfections of striving and seeking and attempting to make it all work. Because you choose a home, it is yours, and anything wrong represents something wrong inside you. That is a powerful and enabling thought I've found, as time rolls on by. 

I'd like to think all that is what people are after when they talk of home, but I doubt that's true. Home for some is purely aspirational, what someone once told them a large mansion with nice furniture would be. For others, sadly, I don't think it exists at all, either as a choice or as an idea. But home can exist for anyone. It is simply the act of assuming responsibility for a small slice of the world on behalf of yourself and the people you love. It's a place where you can provide, welcome, and build, a rose you can take care of, a place that serves as a sturdy foundation for the rest of life to both fail and flourish when you walk outside your front door.