A Long Journey

“You must go on a long journey before you can really find out how wonderful home is.”

Tove Jansson, Comet in Moominland

A year ago, I had the least sense of home that I’d maybe ever had. I was living out of the spare room in the house of my best friend and her partner, the entire personal contents of my space whatever I’d shoved into two suitcases for the few months I’d be there. I was working a familiar job in a familiar city, although neither the job nor the city were captivating me much. At the end of my short contract, I’d haul those two suitcases back up to the north of Scotland, to my parents’ house, where the rest of my stuff currently lived, in an array of bags and boxes. 

It was the right time, then, for me to decide to take off as a nomad for the year. I had nothing quite tying me anywhere, in this limbo between having left Canada and my permanent life there earlier in the year, and whatever came next – at least in any kind of longterm sense. I was already unsettled and disjointed without a next job lined up or a sense of where I wanted to put down roots. 

And that was the big one because, ultimately, I did long for a place to call home. In a way, it’s what I’d been searching for my whole life, as I moved between flats and cities and continents. A place that would finally make me say, ah, yes – this is it for me now.

Over the past nine months, I journeyed through Europe in search of that place. Starting in the south, from Lisbon and then up through Italy, to then spend several months across the Nordics, and ending up in Paris. Many of the places I went I had been before, although not all. Several of them were places that felt they might be right: Italy had always been a kind of second home; I’d had settled periods in Paris before that had felt wonderful; and the Nordics were as familiar to me as home could be.

Everywhere I went, I was able to build some kind of a little life for myself that could resemble a home, if only for a little while. Enough to keep me going. But certainly in some of those places, I quickly knew that it wasn’t the right one; that I could never see a whole life unfolding for myself there, no matter any little routines I might build or friends I might make.

I started to get a sense of what I was looking for. There’s a feeling you get, when you feel at home somewhere: I was sure of that and I felt it, once or twice. Rome was the first, although my life was simple and largely uneventful and I only really made one or two friends. But I had a routine there. Early morning runs around the Colosseum and language classes with espresso drunk across the street on our breaks. Aperitivo an evening or two a week with a friend from school and a porchetta sandwich on Fridays from the hole-in-the-wall bar down the street from my apartment.

Some version of me could have lived here. But along with the necessity of a feeling of home, come the practicalities. The day-to-day mundane of living somewhere: the paperwork, the social services, the finding of employment or social circles. Italy, for its many graces, is a bit of a nightmare when it comes to all of the above, not least as a foreigner.

My twelve-year-old niece had no patience for the feelings and was interested only in the practicalities. She set up a spreadsheet with ten key categories for which I was to rate each location – from housing to job opportunities to climate – from which she could then assign the place an overall score.

Based on her spreadsheet, the moment I scored off Copenhagen it was a done deal for her. She was insistent I would not top those scores. I rolled my eyes and smiled and told her not to get ahead of herself, that I still had several months to go. 

But, secretly, I probably already knew, too. I probably knew it from the moment I stepped into the apartment I was renting, put down my bags, and got hit with a sense that I’d just returned home from a long journey. I hadn’t been to Copenhagen in well over twenty years, I didn’t know anyone in the city. I had just arrived off the back of a full day of travelling. I was in a stranger’s apartment, looking out over a park of people I didn’t know going about their lives.

And yet, I felt the most at home I had felt in as long as I could remember.

And by the time I left Copenhagen, having made friends, having found routines, having fallen in love with a city that was all feeling and practicality – well, it’s true. Nowhere else probably stood a chance.

I got what I needed from this long journey, but I also was reminded over and over of the other meanings of home. Being back in Europe, and being on a rather flexible schedule, meant I saw more of family and friends over the course of the year than I had been able to while living in Toronto. Not least, of my parents. 

People can be as much a home as place, grounding you into the earth when you yourself are so untethered. Each time I returned to see my parents this year – usually a practical necessity involving swapping of suitcase contents or attending a nearby wedding – it was as though my soul could reset from the constant moving and travelling, from the packing and unpacking. And as they, too, get older, I realise how much I will treasure that I had these extra moments with them this year, that so often get lost in the chaos of our lives as the younger generation.

Chaos is a good way to describe what comes next, as before next year’s move to Copenhagen and my long-awaited nesting phase, I have three months of backpacking through Asia and beyond to get through. Admittedly, it turns out that travelling for a full year in your thirties is remarkably tiring and if I could go back and suggest that maybe having a whole month off might be a good thing, I would. As it is, I have a bag that once again needs to be packed, the last dregs of a nasty cough to get over, and three last months as a nomad ahead of me. 

I’ll enjoy it once I get out there; I know I will. Places I’ve always longed to see, stories to be collected. But right now, it is this odd kind of pull between wanting nothing more than to start building that home I’ve been dreaming of for so long, and finishing this long journey.

But maybe it is that long journey that makes home all the more special. I sat with my parents the other morning by a small lake in the countryside. It was a brisk autumnal morning, but not cold. The lake was full of ducks; a pair of swans in the distance. A little girl was playing Pooh sticks with her parents nearby.

My mum took my arm. “Next week, when you’re surrounded by noise and people, you can remember this quiet corner in Scotland.” 

A memory of home, to keep me company during my upcoming travels.