Ask Ellie: Where should I live?

Dear Ellie,

I’m one of the very fortunate few who thrived during the pandemic: None of my loved ones got sick, I got to spend quality time with my family, I saved a lot of money, and not only did I keep my job, but I find it more rewarding and enjoyable without the commute and the office politics. And my company has performed so well during the pandemic that we’re going to stay in remote mode forever, meaning we can now live anywhere we want.

I moved to this city more than a decade ago after college, and it’s come to feel like home to me — in both good and bad ways. I find comfort here, I have a large network as well as some very close friends, and I know where to find the best anything — whether it’s a dentist, a dance party, or dessert. But as with any home, no matter how lovely, after a while all you see is the peeling paint and warped floorboards.

I’m single and childless, and my friends and family are spread out in cities around the country (and the world), so now that I’m officially untethered, I sometimes feel the itch to go on a grand adventure and try living somewhere new. In a different city I could afford a bigger apartment or be closer to nature. I could even live somewhere I don’t hate the weather. But I still love home, and I’m scared to leave everything I have here behind.

So with all of that said, my question for you is: Where should I live?

Sincerely yours,
Some Who Wander Actually Are Lost

Dear SWWAAL,

Wait a minute . . . did I write this to myself and then forget about it? Apparently not, shockingly. All the same, I think they’ll probably engrave “where should I live?” on my tombstone, so while I’m going to do my best here, know that this is very much the blind leading the blind.

First things first: four continents and countless homes later, I have come to realize that “where should I live?” is the wrong question. Not because the “should” implies that there’s a correct answer, a correct place, and everywhere else is wrong — though maybe that too.

More to the point, “where should I live?” makes “I” the sole subject of the equation. I’d like to throw grammar to the wind and give us both a different question: Where wants to live me?

If you’ve lived your whole adult life in a big city, you probably have a pretty consumerist attitude to place. This is not an attack — I’m exactly the same, unless I’m very careful not to be. When you live in a metropolis and you can get anything and everything, all of the time, the name of the game is to become a shrewd consumer of your options. It’s to find the best dentist and dance party and dessert. Neighbourhoods are defined by what you can consume there, be it ice cream or art or Indian food or fashion. Leisure time often consists of journeying between neighbourhoods, consuming what each has to offer.

And we all know by now that consumerism makes us fucking miserable. Sure, the new thing — the city or the ice cream or the shirt — seems shiny and fun for a while; there’s maybe even the glimmer of a promise that it will miraculously fill the hole in you and solve all your problems. But before long it’s all peeling paint and warped floorboards and you’re sick of it and ready for the next thing. And as you move from place to place, shop to shop, purchase to purchase, consuming objects and experiences, a horrible, sickening feeling might start to gnaw at your guts: the suspicion that nothing will ever be enough, that everything will always lose its shine and the only thing keeping you out of the abyss is the inexorable cycle of new things to consume. The gnawing sense, in other words, that this whole fucking game is rigged against you finding any meaning or satisfaction with what you’ve got.

Maybe that sounds too intense. Maybe I’ve pushed myself to an extreme of this experience after eleven years of wandering. But I think a version of this feeling is pretty widespread, if muted. In fact I think many people, especially those of us who live in cities, don’t really know that there’s any other way to live in place, beyond the consumer experience.

Imagine a different relationship with place: one that — like any other meaningful relationship — is reciprocal, respectful, even reverent. Mythologists often describe this as a kind of courtship of place. What might it look like? Hestia, the goddess of the hearth, is one of the least-celebrated Greek deities these days, but in her day she was worshipped more than any other. Every house and communal building had a fireplace, and you would worship Hestia every morning as you made the fire and every evening as you banked it. You paid your dues to the powers bigger than you that shared your home and kept it running.

This is what it means to live in courtship of place: to make regular offerings of attention and care; to recognize that the place has its own life and spirit beyond the human, and that the health of your relationship with that spirit depends on you attending to it. This winter, while hibernating in Vermont, I took a daily pilgrimage to a tree to read it poems and stories, and to listen to the sound of the world on the bank of the brook where it stood. It was one of the most healing and grounding experiences of my life. It’s amazing what you can hear about a place when you stand still and listen, and how that changes you — how you start to feel held in a living web, instead of rattling around this world alone.

So what I’m wondering is: are the peeling paint and warped floorboards of home actually an opportunity? After all, in any relationship, it’s easy to adore someone’s best bits. The treasure of real love comes from learning to accept and even cherish their flaws. And don’t forget that wherever you go, at a certain point you’ll start to notice that peeled paint, those chipped floorboards, the shitty weather, the traffic or the lack of trees or the distance from some of the people you love. Nothing is everything, and accepting the limitations of a place (or a person, for that matter) turns out to be one of the most enriching things you can do, not least because it will help you to accept your own limitations. Ultimately, it comes down to living in the real instead of some imagined and unattainable paradise — the phantom of anything and everything, all of the time, that is the life-ruining promise of consumerism.

Or maybe not! There’s a lot to be said for committing to your home and learning to court it, but that’s not the only right answer here. In fact, the kind of “grand adventure” you mention is a critical life stage, too. Sure, the “hero’s journey” motif as traced by Joseph Campbell feels stale and stuffy today, but there’s a bone-deep truth in it: at some point, many people’s souls are called to head out into places unknown, to learn the kind of lessons you can only learn away from your people and your place and the idea of you that lives there. Is this the kind of itch you’re feeling? Only you can gauge that. I can tell you that eleven years ago, when I left my home, it felt less like an itch and more like a life-and-death need. Every New Year’s Eve that passed, I hated myself a little more because I hadn’t done it — I hadn’t broken out into the world yet. I had no idea what I was supposed to do out there, or even where I was supposed to go. I only knew that I had to go, even though I was terrified, and that if I didn’t, I would feel I had wasted my life.

So which of these life stages are you in? Are you being called by a grand adventure that will make you become yourself? Or are you being invited to grow by deepening your ability to commit?

Only you know the answer to this question. The main advice I can offer you is that wherever you end up, you must attend to it humbly and let it live you.

Xx Ellie