Maybe it’s time for James and company to move?

I am currently in thrall to house hunting, which has unfortunately become a stress I’m acutely familiar with; since 2012, I’ve lived in 4 different places, the next looking to be number 5. I’m hoping to find some permanence in the next accommodation, but that’s the thing about patterns – every time you think it’s broken, you find yourself back on line for another ride.

In each of these places, Jena and I have looked not at what it is, but what it could be. Specifically, how it could be our habitat. Our place for existing in those silent moments of solitary companionship, and loud nights of accompanied merriment. And though each had its own rough start, by the end, each has been lovingly referred to as home. Though, it may have something to do with the company kept in each one.

It goes further than the furnishings and flourish that comes with your “stuff”. Your best friend and partner can make any home yours. They add that familiarity, that anchor, that gives your place more permanence because it holds something lasting. It’s why all places, though different, are still the same home I’ve lived in for the last 5 or so years. It’s hokey, but love warms a place more than any steam heater that clangs in the waking hours of the night.

For a while, New York was home. Then it was LA. Then it was LA again, but with a conclave of friends who had become a new family. Then it was New York again for a fresh start. And once more, we look for another fresh start. I wonder if it’s because no place feels good enough to set down my hat for too long, the call of adventure and the world too great to keep me in one place. But then again, everywhere I go, my wife and the souvenirs of our adventures come with me in some form or another. So it’s not really moving so much as… shifting, I suppose.

A place can be cleaned, broken, destroyed, or sold. But what you fill it with, whether it be physical or personal, is what turns it into a home. And if you need to move, or when someone violates and destroys that place, it doesn’t change what you put into it. Sometimes what you put in can be broken. But sometimes, the things you put in there can’t be broken, because they have ascended beyond that. And wherever you are and go, you’ll take it with you.

Still, packing is gonna be a bitch.