Back to school is coming fast. That means that my lofty summer of rolling without a landlord is over. It has been a great summer and I have learned a lot about how to full-time RV with grace. Mostly, I've learned why it's great to have contrast in life and to live with daily variety and that how we define "home" is deeply cultural.
Over the course of this summer, I have occupied about four distinct locations that I started to call home. Since I don't have the money to just bounce around wherever, I have kept the RV in place as long as possible. Since my particular RV is totally self contained, my only regular utility has been electricity via an extension cord to friends' houses.
When I started out, I was a little afraid of what this would all entail -- I was worried that I would get in trouble for parking on streets in front of friends' houses, and I was worried about things like showers. As I quickly learned, my worries didn't take into account my adaptability and resourcefulness.
Even though I ended up on the road for work for a month and a half of the summer, I quickly found that my life was little different than it was before. I was still being efficient with water and electricity and I still had a roof over my head. The only real oddity was finding showers, which as a graduate student on summer break really wasn't a problem.
Looking back, one of my biggest roadblocks and causes of worry were from not knowing just what the next step would bring. Paranoia about what awaited me without a stable pad for my house to occupy was likely born from an entirely non-nomadic culture. As it turns out, being nomadic is actually great fun and there is little to worry about -- especially when you own the roof over your head outright and can be anywhere you want to be.
My sense of "home" was pretty deeply rattled with this summer's experiment. I never felt "homeless" or lost, even though I moved the RV to different locations, which is strange if you think about it. Most people seem to associate "home" with a house on a foundation -- one location that they come home to every night for a minimum of a year at a time (with 12 months being the standard lease period and all).
With the frequent changing of setting, I started to realize that "home" isn't as static as most people might think. For me, it became my shelter -- the RV. And not just the thing itself, but the familiarity of the interior -- my things and the arrangement of those things that are inside it. Home became the place where my tools to survive and exist well were.
Since all of my things and my sense of home were on wheels and no longer rooted in a foundation, I encountered major implications of my sense of identity and my sense of roots in a place. In essence, the world around be became my home, regardless of where it was that my home happened to be parked. In that, my sense of home became much bigger -- it is no longer rooted in a foundation and a house or place -- home became wherever I was at the time and the environment that I occupied.
I spent much of the summer living out of my truck for work, but because of my experience with the RV, this transition was invisible to me. My sense of home had nothing to do with the RV, rather home became my truck, tent, and wherever I happened to be. It seems that this would count as evidence for a full-bore transition to being nomadic.
While on the road, I never really longed for being home because home was wherever I was. It's an odd thing to go from thinking that home was a structure and a foundation to realizing that home is actually survival tools and social networks. Of all of this, I realized that whatever home is to me, it isn't lawns, garden gnomes, and porcelain toilets -- it's my environment, my tools for living, and the people around me.
All in all, the summer has been great, but it is time to reintroduce that traditional stability for the coming winter and the school semester ahead. It's a funny thing to have to come full circle, but the knowledge of what's out there and that home is anything I want it to be has been invaluable. Even though I'm sad to not be as free as I was this summer, that's okay, because now home will be the library, the department, and RV again. Come next summer, home could be the mountains or the desert, or even the arctic. While I'm afraid the experience has pushed me further into becoming a true nomad, it has also taught me the value of stability when stability is needed. Knowing when stability is needed and when it is not is the key -- along with the ability to shift gears quickly and confidently when opportunities present themselves to float freely and not be chained to a foundation.
No comments:
Post a Comment