A Nomad's Advice on Settling In

I often refer to myself as a Brooklyn-born nomad, since I was born in Brooklyn, but have never really claimed one particular place as my home over another. Perhaps a nomad is not someone who is at home nowhere, but rather someone who is at home anywhere.

Have you ever considered how your identity is shaped by so many things that are outside of your control at the very outset of your life. Before you are born, your genetics are providentially predetermined. Before you speak, your parents determine your name and your early lifestyle. As you grow older, you begin to determine and, or change aspects of your identity.

In his sharp, affecting, and hilarious show, Homecoming King, Hasan Minhaj, says “Popping out of your mom is like real estate. It’s all about location.” The joke goes on to honor his hometown of Davis, California. It makes me laugh, and it also makes me think about how the place you live is an interesting, flexible component of your identity. You can only be a native of one place, yet you may inhabit any place and call it your own - a new part of your identity. When you consider all of these things that begin to make a place your home or yourself a part of a place, it might be a little overwhelming. Here are some things that I have learned throughout my nomadic journey.

I moved a lot throughout my childhood - over a dozen times. I have lived in New  York, Oklahoma, Illinois, Louisiana, Georgia, and Texas. I enjoyed many things about each place that I lived, but as a child, I gave very little thought to the relationship between the place that I lived and my identity. Had I become a Tulsan when I moved from Queens to Tulsa? Was that title immediately assumed, or was it “earned”. Perhaps there was a certain set of questions that I should be able to answer if I called myself a local.

More important than the relation of yourself to a place, is the relation of a place to yourself - is it home? Home is more than a place. There is a sweet sentiment that has been spoken and sung of one person to another: “Home is wherever I’m with you.” It’s a lovely sentiment, but I think that home is where your community is. So then, to make yourself at home, you have to build your community. Similarly there is a children’s song that says “Make new friends, but keep the old, one is silver and the other is gold.” To make yourself at home in a place is to bring the bring the memories and the keepsakes of the places you’ve come from and to begin building and collecting new ones in the place that you are now. It is to make new friends and find new favorites - favorites places to spend time, favorite traditions to adopt, favorite events to attend.

I’ve been following a teaching series about the Kingdom of God, and found the description of what it is to be akin to my notion of community. The notion is that there are two components, presence and participation. In terms God’s kingdom, that means His presence and our participation. In terms of community that looks like the presence of others and your participation with them. You are part of the community by default, as you are inevitably in the presence of others, but your participation with them is what makes community home.

Participation in community may sound a lot more challenging than it is. To begin with, your day to day life will likely involve participation at work or at school. Take advantage of the opportunity to get to know the folks that you work and study with - accept their invitations to grab lunch later or prepare for an exam together. Then, follow up with them - let them know that you enjoyed the time and that you would love to do it again. When you get to feeling brave or comfortable enough, you can begin to extend such invitations on your own.

Likewise, there are many places that can become part of your routine and provide opportunities to start conversations that lead to further engagement. Try new eateries and find your favorites. Get set up at your local library. Join a gym. As you frequent such places, you will likely find other regulars that you can drum up conversations with. If you have a dog, you’re already in with the dog walking crowd - dog owners love to talk to fellow dog owners. They’ll talk about their dogs plenty, but the conversations often go deeper. I know a woman who met her husband in a dog park. I kid you not. They bonded over their dogs and their conversations in the dog park, and now they’re living happily ever after with their dogs and two kids.

Becoming a local is not a matter of longevity or knowledge, so much as a desire and an effort to connect with the people and the culture of that place. The only real requirement for localhood (a term I thought I might have coined, but apparently exists already) is that you live in the place for which you claim it. Even that is becoming a loose requirement, as places like Copenhagen push for visitors to seek out temporary localhood over tourism. Just moved to Dallas? Wanna be a Dallasite? Done. A genuine desire for that localhood will drive you to practically become a local. In getting plugged in to your community, you’re halfway there. Your next step is to embark upon local adventures. It took me twelve years to realize the value and opportunity in that. I have only recently started exploring my city. My intention is to seek out new places, people, and experiences to learn more about myself, as well as the stories and perspectives of others. I have found that it is also a fantastic way to deepen and expand my community. I’ve had a wonderful time exploring with friends that I already have and meeting new folks as well.

Go anywhere and learn about its history or its  offerings. Check out various cultural and recreational events in your area. Oftentimes those are cost-effective or even free. Plan a day to visit one of the places you’ve heard about, but still haven’t been. Meet the owner of a new local business and gain an appreciation not just for their menu or products, but for their passion and vision as well. Drive an aimless stretch of miles until you find something that interests you. Or walk - if you’re into that. Grab your keys and your camera and go discover all that your city has to offer.

Last but not least, in the interest of both making yourself at home and becoming a real local, consider what you may have to offer your community. Find an organization with a mission that you’re passionate about and serve your community by volunteering with them. Look for opportunities to share your talent with your community. Submit your work to a local art festival. Try out for a community theater play or a local music festival. Look into teaching a yoga class at the rec center. If you are bold enough and you can embrace your inner Mr. Rogers, you might give thought to offering up a turquoise table to foster  community in your own yard. You do you and let it be a blessing to others. Likewise, go and enjoy your community.

A Few Thoughts on Social Media

I was 18 years old when I opened my first social media account. I had grown up in a sort of impenetrable bubble, shielded from a lot of societal or otherwise secular influence, so social media was most definitely out of the question. Of course, there were other reasons why, and I understood that it was mostly for my protection. Still, I always wondered what it would be like, and I was glad when I found the perfect excuse to open an account. I was still living at home, under my parents' rules when I started attending college to study media and communication. One of my very first classes required me to study my own social media interactions, which was hard to do without a social media account.  So, with studies on my side, I told my parents that I would need to open a Facebook account. Within a year, the rest of my family was on Facebook. Since then I've opened accounts across several social media platforms. I’ve seen various platforms come and go, while others have evolved. Someone somewhere is probably studying the trends and the evolution of social media within the past decade or so. As for me, I've been invited to give thought to social media's current place versus the right place and whether those are dichotomous.

I'll be considering this not through an academic lens, but through the lens of observation and personal experience. I do not necessarily have a ton of experience with social media. I  am mostly a spectator in that realm. It might be said that social media was born of a need or a desire to connect with others, which may be true but not singularly so. In my observation and experience, people's personal motivation for the use of social media springs not only from a desire to connect with others but also from a deeper desire to be known. We share the things that make us proud, the things that make us laugh, the things that inspire and compel us, and we hope that it will resonate with someone, somewhere on the other end of our posts and our shares, and that when it does, we might feel a bit connected and a little known. I think that social media is an important tool that allows us to engage in this “knowing” and “connection”, but the fact is, that those connections are typically surface level, and they can only go so deep. With a bit of wisdom, we understand that social media is rendered useless in our hands if we do not understand its purpose. Social media alone cannot build or maintain relationships, which are the real space in which we connect and are known. People have to put in the time to interact with one another in person (in as much as it is possible) in order to build and maintain relationships. Social media has the potential to help us keep up with people more than with relationships. As of today, I have 1,254 Facebook friends. 66 of them posted on my timeline to wish me a Happy  Birthday this past June. I have probably posted on the timelines of fewer than that. Of course, posting on my birthday is not the telltale sign of whether or not we really are friends. However, these numbers are a pretty decent representation of the number of people we connect with on social media versus the number of people we have real relationships with.

That doesn’t mean that I’m about to purge my account. I can honestly say that I care about my other Facebook friends. From my little corner of the world, I wish them well. I am happy for their good news and saddened by their bad news. I root for them and am happy for their successes. I may be more attentive to some than to others, but in some small way, I am invested in all of their lives. I so appreciate that social media affords me that opportunity.

There are other types of meaning and implications for social media, and how it allows us to engage. The great minds that shape and create social media platforms waste no time in monetizing our posts and our shares. But greater minds have figured out how to use social media to engage others for good. I have seen a social media fundraiser exceed it goal within 24 hours and provide a great help to those in need. I have seen a movement on social media mobilize activists and volunteers in the service of their communities. I have seen social media provide a safe space for important conversations that have the power to inform perspectives and develop understanding between the least likely participants. Social media can help to do so much good in the hands of people who care.

I think that oftentimes when we consider the place of social media today and the place where it should be, we think of all the ways that it furthers distance between people who are close enough to reach out to one another in real life and dissonance between people we could not otherwise reach to bring down. “Haters” and “trolls” are not the results of social media - they existed long before and they’ll exist long after. Social media is not the enabler of anyone who would use it to harm others. All the best or worst that social media can do depends entirely upon who uses it, and how they choose to do so. The functionality and reach of social media continue to expand, but the place of social media then and the place of social media now are not dichotomous - they are synonymous. Social media continues to be a tool for drawing people towards one another for deeper more meaningful real-life endeavors.

And so it begins (again)

Last night I had the good fortune to meet with a friend and discover that we shared an interest in writing as well as a corresponding need for the discipline that is required to be a writer. We recognized an opportunity to encourage each other in this pursuit and determined what it would look like for us to be writing accountability partners. So just like that, here I am, after a long, unplanned hiatus from my blog, returning to what I hope will be a lot more writing.

It has been an interesting couple of months. My writing space was silent, because my life, and by extension, my mind was anything but. You would think that a mind buzzing at such volume would enable me to write plenty, but it left me with a lot to sort out and a serious need for quiet. I made a few difficult decisions, I learned some things about myself, and I ultimately found myself facing a number of unknowns. I suppose that in a sense, life is the sum of a series of unknowns, but one of the comforts I find is the knowledge (or rather the perception) that there are in fact a few "knowns". I live out my knowns without giving much thought to them, as they comprise my routine - home, work, dinner, family, dog, tv, sleep. When even one of my neat little knowns threatens to become unknown, I become stressed. May and June (and honestly even a while before that) were stressful tiresome months, and while I am still awaiting resolution for a number of the troubles that plagued me in that season, I have found a little rest and renewing reminders that make the coming days seem a little less daunting. I'll write about those troubles, once they are behind me (hopefully soon).

Today, I just want to silently declare that I am back at it again, with great intention and great encouragement. I have a handful of drafts to complete, movie reviews that I started since last year, and a number of other topics in mind.

Friend(s), let's do this.