It is 6pm Saturday afternoon, San Francisco standard time, seventy-five degrees, sun just beginning to set behind the hills, city trading day life for night.
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My brother begins college in Atlanta next week, and my sister will study abroad in Spain this spring. My father’s parents will drive cross-country again this summer for another set of graduations, even though my grandfather broke his collarbone driving on Minnesota ice last winter. My mother’s father has been gone almost ten years, and I don’t think we spoke on the phone even once, the year he died.
We live very separate lives.
.
My father once told me that while he envies me the San Francisco sun, he doesn’t think he and my mother will ever move out west. Once you put roots down, he said, it’s hard to move. Your community becomes more important than anything else. It takes care of you, it gives you context, it makes you happier than anything else.
This seems obvious, but at 25, I still can’t see myself staying in one place for long. I get itchy feet. I get tired of speaking only English. Once I know a place, I start wanting to meet another. For me, the novel has always trumped the known.
But the more people I meet, and the more places I know, the more unhealthy this nomadic lifestyle seems, as a cultural theme – even if it is a central tenet of US culture. We go away to college, and meet and make new friends – then start a job and do it all again. We change cities and friends when we change jobs, when we change careers, when it suits us, when we have to. We keep up with perhaps one in ten or fifty of the people we know well from each phase of our lives.
It seems we only find community through our children; family life forces us to ’settle down,’ to participate in the PTA, become soccer and scouting parents, grow away from distant friends with time. Children pull us together as a community in the US (“it takes a village”) and childhood is the time when individuals are most plugged into a community – until we have our own children, and unless our parents continued moving when we were young.
No surprise, then, that childhood and youth are idealized in the US; like it or not, that kind of closeness matters to us, as human beings. More than money, more than achievement, more than anything else – we need intimate, subtle, long-lasting relationships in our lives, and not (only) romantic relationships; we need the give-and-take of long-term friendships, the annoyances that come with keeping up with the Joneses (or being the Joneses), the comfort of knowing our place in a community, advice and sympathy from people who’ve seen our lives evolve. We’re tribal by nature (just think about the way your office is organized…), and we need desperately to belong to some group, somewhere.
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So we need community, but in order to have it, we must give up advancement – or experiences – that we might otherwise obtain. So we promise ourselves we’ll get back to community, or we create it as we go along.
I think TV fills in, for some; if you watch Colbert often enough, he’ll start to seem real, a friend. The internet lets you can connect across time zones, country boundaries, whatever. But it’s still not enough. Working from home doesn’t replace a physical office, phone sex does no justice to the real thing, and virtual relationships are just that.
Although they can help.
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San Francisco is a city of nomads, digital and otherwise. Most of the people I know now will be gone in a few years, if I don’t leave first, myself. Nearly everyone I know acts within fluid groups of friends. We shift in and out of each others’ lives with barely a ripple. We stand in for the friends we’ve had in highschool and in college, we stand in for family, we create context, even if that context has no depth, no background.
We seek meaning in activities, in our careers, in our romantic relationships.
And perhaps there’s nothing wrong with that. All I know is that I’m coming to believe roots matter, even if we don’t like it much – coming to believe healthy people are part of healthy communities, and that those communities are almost impossible to maintain if we keep changing location. And that the opportunities and experiences we want most are almost impossible to attain if we don’t.
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I don’t know what the answer is; I don’t know if there is one. Use your technology to maintain your community! sounds great, but I can only call my sisters so many times a week; it’s not the same as cooking dinner together on a Friday night. And phone time takes away from the real, the now.
My siblings and I want to live in the same city some day; it’s a plan, the best we’ve come up with so far. Now all we have to do is pick a city to grow roots in. I hope it will be somewhere with long, slow sunsets…
