I realized, when I backtracked my longest duration of employment of 3 years, that I moved 5 times during that time. Every 6 months on the average, though some stays, like the one with my
psycho roommate, were shorter. In the total 5 years I've been here, I've moved a total of
9 times. This comes as even less of a
surprise to me as it does the fact that this is not uncommon, for my area or for
my age group in general. When everything else in the world seems to be getting less and less stable, reliable, consistant or predictable, having a migratory
lifestyle seems almost a prerequsite, depending on what all the moving provides. For me, I didn't move farther than a few blocks in most cases, though the last 3 moves have focused on my desire to be near the Quarter, where everything worth doing and
my church is situated.
Almost all aspects of our society, while being founded on stationary concepts (city, metropolis, suburbia, consumerism), we as a species are drawn magnetically, it seems, to hover about its surface. We need work, so in cases such as the Boeing's lay off of 60% of its work force in Seattle during the 70's, we move to where the work is, wherever it is. We switch cities, coasts, time zones, dowsing for water in the desert if water was what we needed (or believed we needed) most. Our concept of family and its center having long since moved from a family-centered business as a means of income in addition to its many ways of severing from within due to divorce and single-parent homes or estranged, distanced families make their marks on us as individuals and as (sad to say it again) a generation of nomads.
It would seem that I have been culled from a specific formula that was guaranteed to produce a wandering nomad in search of something I believed would never be found if I simply looked within my origin, within myself. And no, I have not yet found many things that have forced me to stay in one spot, in the permanent sense. The chagrin we may have undergone if we, say, moved to another city for love we found online, as many of us have, has lost its grip on our guilt; it has lost the stigma of "loserness." I myself have benefited from not caring what people think in that area. Not that many people who benefited from finding love online cared two shits either, but still we did feel a need at one point to legitimize our interests. Not so with jobs or improvement of living conditions. These have been acceptable since the dawn of America.
There was a large desertion of traditional values in the earlier part of what can be considered our brief history (the mid to late 60's), where all traditional moral, ethical, social, sexual, and religious beliefs were temporarily uprooted as we sought for better ways to govern ourselves as enlightened people. In some ways, we're seeing the results of both the abandonment and retrieval of those traditions being played out now, the cause and effects and witnessing the chain reactions they usher in: education, individual rights, govnerment intervention, faith in our leaders, pride in our country, personal sense of fulfillment. And no, these shifts are not in any way unique, as our evolution is a continuous one, though also gaining momentum and speed with our leaps and bounds in both technological and psychological efforts at attaining superior longevity and security.
All of the above were needed; I'll not contest that. Some decisions were good and some need more work. Some need to be revamped altogether. I'll let you decide which are which for yourself. Some people can migrate their whole lives, to the point that the energy that drives them comes solely from their mobility and all the adventures and mistakes it brings, just as staying put can bring similar outcomes. But most of us eventually, whether because of our bodies or the combined evolution and change of our goals in life, settle down in one place for a significant amount of time, plant roots, and venture out as limitedly or as boundlessly as our means allow. In this we may attain the balance we've long lost by never knowing where it was we needed to be.