Where is home Pico Iyer

where do you come from it’s such a

simple question but these days of course

simple questions bring even more

complicated answers people are always

asking me where I come from and they’re

expecting me to say India and they’re

absolutely right insofar as 100 percent

of my blood and ancestry does come from

India except I’ve never lived one day of

my life there I can’t speak even one

word of it’s more than 22,000 dialects

so I don’t think I’ve really earned the

right to call myself an Indian and if

where do you come from means where were

you born and raised and educated then

I’m entirely of that funny little

country known as England except I left

England as soon as I completed my

undergraduate education and all the time

I was growing up I was the only kid in

all my classes who didn’t begin to look

like the classic English heroes

represented in our textbooks and if

where do you come from means where do

you pay your taxes where do you see your

doctor in your dentist then I’m very

much of the United States and I have

been for 48 years now since I was a

really small child except for many of

those years I’ve had to carry around

this funny little pink card with green

lines running through my face

identifying me as a permanent alien I do

actually feel more alien the longer I

live there and if where do you come from

means which place goes deepest inside

you and where do you try to spend most

of your time then I’m Japanese because

I’ve been living as much as I can for

the last 25 years in Japan except all of

those years I’ve been there on a tourist

visa and I’m fairly sure not many

Japanese would want to consider me one

of them and I say all this just to

stress how very old-fashioned and

straightforward my background is because

when I go to Hong Kong Sydney or

Vancouver most of the kids I meet are

much more international and

multicultural IM and they have one home

associated with their pair

but another associated with their

partners a third connected maybe with

the place where they happen to be a

fourth connected with the place they

dream of being and many more besides and

their whole life will be spent taking

pieces of many different places and

putting them together into a stained

glass whole home for them is really a

work in progress it’s like a project on

which they’re constantly adding upgrades

and improvements and corrections and for

more and more of us home has really less

to do with a piece of soil then you

could say with a piece of soul if

somebody suddenly asks me where’s your

home I think about my sweetheart or my

closest friends or the songs that travel

with me wherever I happen to be and I’d

always felt this way but it really came

home to me as it were some years ago

when I was climbing up the stairs in my

parents house in California and I looked

through the living room windows and I

saw that we were encircled by 70 foot

flames one of those wildfires regularly

tear through the hills of California and

many other such places and three hours

later that fire had reduced my home and

every last thing in it except for me to

ash and when I woke up the next morning

I was sleeping on a friend’s floor the

only thing I had in the world was a

toothbrush and I just bought from an

all-night supermarket

of course if anybody asked me then where

is your home I literally couldn’t point

to any physical construction my home

would have to be whatever I carried

around inside me and in so many ways I

think this is a terrific liberation

because when my grandparents were born

they pretty much had their sense of home

the sense of community even their sense

of enmity assigned to them at birth and

didn’t have much chance of stepping

outside of that and nowadays at least

some of us can choose our sense of home

create our sense of community fashion

our sense of self and in so doing maybe

step a little beyond some of the black

and white divisions

of our grandparents age no coincidence

that the president of the strongest

nation on earth is half Kenyan partly

raised in Indonesia has a Chinese

Canadian brother-in-law the number of

people living in countries not their own

now comes to 220 million and that’s an

almost unimaginable number but it means

that if you took the whole population of

Canada and the whole population of

Australia and then the whole population

of Australia again and the whole

population of Canada again and doubled

that number you would still have fewer

people than belong to this great

floating tribe and the number of us who

live outside the old nation-state

categories is increasing so quickly by

64 million just in the last 12 years

that soon there will be more of us than

there are Americans already we represent

the fifth largest nation on earth and in

fact in Canada’s largest city Toronto

the average resident today is what used

to be called a foreigner somebody born

in a very different country and I’ve

always felt that the beauty of being

surrounded by the foreign is that it

slaps you awake you can’t take anything

for granted

Travel for me is a little bit like being

in love because suddenly all your senses

are at the setting marked on suddenly

your alerts to the secret patterns of

the world the real voyage of discovery

as Marcel Proust famously said consists

not in seeing new sights but in looking

with new eyes and of course once you

have new eyes even the old sights even

your home becomes something different

many of the people living in countries

not their own are refugees who never

wanted to leave home and ache to go back

home but for the fortunate among us I

think the age of movement brings

exhilarating new possibilities

certainly when I’m traveling especially

to the major cities of the world the

typical person I meet today will be

let’s say a half Korean half German

young woman and living in Paris and as

soon as she meets a half Thai half

Canadian

guy from Edinburgh she recognizes him as

kin she realizes that she probably has

much more in common with him than with

anybody entirely of Korea or entirely of

Germany so they become friends they fall

in love they moved to New York City and

or Edinburgh and the little girl who

arises out of their Union will of course

be not Korean or German or French or

Thai or Scotch or Canadian or even

American but a wonderful and constantly

evolving mix of all those places and

potentially everything about the way

that young woman dreams about the world

writes about the world thinks about the

world could be something different

because it comes out of this almost

unprecedented blend of cultures where

you come from now is much less important

than where you’re going more and more of

us are rooted in the future or the

present tense as much as in the past and

whom we know is not just a place where

you happen to be born it’s the place

where you become yourself and yet there

is one great problem with movements and

that is that it’s really hard to get

your bearings when you’re in midair

some years ago I noticed that I had

accumulated 1 million miles on United

Airlines alone you all know that crazy

system six days in hell you get the

seventh day free and and I began to

think that really movement was only as

good as the sense of stillness that you

could bring to it to put it into

perspective and eight months after my

house burnt down I ran into a friend who

taught at a local high school and he

said I’ve got the perfect place for you

really I said then always a bit

skeptical when people say things like

that no honestly he went on it’s it’s

only three hours away by car and it’s

not very expensive and it’s probably not

like anywhere you stayed before hmm it’s

beginning to get slightly intrigued what

is it well yeah my friend hemmed

well actually it’s a Catholic Hermitage

this was the wrong answer

I had spent 15 years in Anglican school

so I had had enough hymnals and crosses

to last me a lifetime

several lifetimes actually but my friend

assured me that he wasn’t Catholic nor

were most of his students but he took

his classes there every spring and as he

had it even the most Restless

distractible testosterone addled

fifteen-year-old Californian boy only

had to spend three days in silence and

something in him cool down and cleared

out he found himself and I thought

anything that works for fifteen-year-old

boy ought to work for me so I got in my

car and I drove three hours north along

the coast and the roads grew emptier and

narrower and then I turned onto an even

narrower path barely paved that snaked

for two miles up to the top of a

mountain and when I got out of my car

the air was pulsing the whole place was

absolutely silent but the silence wasn’t

an absence of noise it was really the

presence of a kind of energy or

quickening and that my feet was the

great still blue plate of the Pacific

Ocean all around me were 800 acres of

wild dry brush and I went down to the

room in which I was to be sleeping small

but eminently comfortable it had a bed

and a rocking chair and a long desk and

even longer picture windows looking out

on the small private walled garden and

then twelve hundred feet of golden

pampas grass running down to the sea and

I sat down and I began to write and

write and write even though I’d gone

there really to get away from my desk

and by the time I got up four hours have

passed night had fallen and I went out

under this great overturned salt shaker

of stars and I could see the taillights

of cars disappearing around the

headlands twelve miles to the south

and it really seemed like my concerns of

the previous day vanishing and the next

day when I woke up in the absence of

telephones and TVs and laptops the day

seemed to stretch for a thousand hours

it was really all the freedom I know

when I’m traveling but it also

profoundly felt by coming home and I’m

not a religious person so I didn’t go to

the services I didn’t consult the monks

for guidance

I just took warps along the monastery

road and sent postcards to loved ones I

looked at the clouds and I did what is

hardest of all for me to do usually

which is nothing at all and I started to

go back to this place and I noticed that

I was doing my most important work there

invisibly just by sitting still and

certainly coming to my most critical

decisions the way I never could when I

was racing from the last email to the

next appointment and I began to think

that something in me had really been

crying out for stillness but of course I

couldn’t hear it because I was running

around so much I was like some crazy guy

who puts on a blindfold and then

complains that he can’t see a thing and

I thought back to that wonderful phrase

I had learned as a boy from Seneca in

which he says that man is poor not who

has little but who hankers after more

and of course I’m not suggesting that

anybody here go to a monastery that’s

not the point but I do think it’s only

by stopping movement that you can see

where to go and it’s only by stepping

out of your life and the world that you

can see what you most deeply care about

and find a home and I’ve noticed so many

people now take conscious measures to

sit quietly for 30 minutes every morning

just collecting themselves in one corner

of the room without their devices or go

running every evening or leave their

cell phones behind when they go to have

a long conversation with a friend

movement is a fan

stick privilege and it allows us to do

so much that our grandparents could

never have dreamed of doing

but movement ultimately only has a

meaning if you have a home to go back to

and home in the end is of course not

just the place where you sleep it’s the

place where you stand thank you

you