My current situation is one of accidental transience. We left Los Angeles in early COVID for a smallish mountain town in Utah. Out of architectural obsession, we bought a 1982 townhouse in a ski resort with the idea we would renovate it and then rent it seasonally. This meant it could not be our “home” in the normal sense, as we couldn’t have our personal stuff out if we were vacation renting it. This temporary solution has now been almost 4 years, much of which has been spent pondering exactly where we should live more permanently. Although I miss all the art and books and memories that are boxed in a storage unit, I miss them less and less every day. Not having them here means we have tremendous flexibility about where we can be: either here in the vacation rental or in New York, Los Angeles, or some other place. But it is also lonely, if that is the word for missing my things.
This is all a lot of heavy thinking around how we define ourselves, what gives us comfort, and where we find meaning. My friend Carlo has a rule: never live in the same place more than 3 years — it keeps the flow of new place-energy going. The downside is: it is very hard to plug in to a new community every 3 years then abandon it. Steven Meisel, the great Vogue photographer, once said he is not interested in having a retrospective of his considerable accomplishments, as it would force him to focus on the past and he is only interested in the future. My good friend Rob, about 5 years ago, sold his big house and moved to an apartment in Santa Monica. At this point, he still had a nice car, home furnishings, exercise gear, and the like. Since then, he has become basically nomadic, staying in various apartments around the world for a few months here and there. The car and the stuff are all gone. As he told me yesterday, he has never felt better or freer in his life. Rob is a very future facing guy. On the other end of the spectrum are a couple I know who bought a giant old house on a big property and have stocked it with all their lifetimes’ accumulation of stuff. It feels homey, but the maintenance of it is a way of life.
I have chosen a life filled with variety: I love big cities and my big city friends while, at the same time, I love the mountains and my outdoorsy friends. What I really don’t like is being bored. I once had a proper house, filled with my stuff. Each weekend was about Home Depot, the Garden Center, and other chores. Now I have an HOA, some of whom are at this very moment painting the outside of our unit, which allows me the mental space to be able to write this. When I was younger, I identified more with what I did and the stuff I had. Certain stuff still warms my heart, like some of the baby artifacts that my mom managed to hold onto from my very early toddler days. There is something warming about feeling the continuum of history. As we get a bit older, some people become the Marie Kondo editors of their lives, others become collectors. I feel somewhere in the middle: missing some things, but not wanting to become an indentured caretaker of them. Maybe home is where our things are?
Onward and upward,
David
