Voyages and home

Some things we do feel like home. This is where we feel safe, secure, and where we rest and are most ourselves, able to reflect and restore our minds and body. Liz Gilbert talks about this in her famous TED talk, where she says, “Find your home. That’s where you belong.”

For her, home is writing. So it has always been for me.

Then again, other things we do feel like voyages. This is when you explore unchartered territories, stumble upon serendipitous paths, meet new people, and gain unexpected knowledge. The movie director Werner Herzog said in an interview with The New Yorker that for him, “making movies feels like a voyage, whereas writing novels is more like home.”

I am slowly beginning to discover that for me, journalism, taking interviews, and working with startups — all of this feels like a voyage, or several different voyages. These things fill me up, change me, test me. But after a long voyage, it always feel good to be back home, writing, reflecting on what the voyage meant and what I’ve learned.

It’s this back-and-forth — voyaging and coming back home — that constitutes life. It’s the basis of all storytelling (“the hero hears a call for adventures, goes into the Outer World, kills the dragon, and comes back home with new knowledge”). It’s what makes us human.

While it’s not necessary for everyone to have a voyage — after all, there’s no shame in living a calm, tranquil, and not particularly eventful life — it’s good to have a home. People who are unfulfilled in life are, in a way, “homeless”.

Figuring out what your home is — and what can be your voyage — seems to me like a worthy task for the rest of your life.