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