Here to Stay: On Choosing to Belong

 John Hallwas

            My wife and I have just returned from our winter place in Florida, a state that epitomizes American rootlessness. Especially along the coasts, people with a deep sense of belonging are a distinct minority, and much of the culture is geared to transients---“snowbirds” like us as well as the ever-changing horde of vacationers. Sometimes, in fact, the Sunshine State seems almost cold and predatory---focused only on the dollars that people bring along with them.

            Don’t get me wrong. Garnette and I enjoy the sunshine, the restaurants, the beaches, the exotic parks---and especially our three grandkids, who live on the Gulf Coast. But each spring we look forward to our return to Macomb, where relationships with friends, signs of seasonal change, long-familiar places, and uncrowded streets exert a strong appeal. For both of us, it’s home.

            As simple as the experience of belonging seems, it is really a complex matter---and increasingly uncommon. More than twenty percent of Americans move each year, and the typical citizen of our country now moves more than a dozen times during his or her life. Those relocations often take people farther away now, too, than in previous generations.

            As poet and scholar Jim Wayne Miller has put it, “[Americans] are rewarded with money, prestige, and success for pursuing nomadic existences. . . . There’s little demand for the kind of knowledge that comes from living a long time in one place, knowledge gained slowly with the turning of seasons, in daily interaction with neighbors. . . .”  

            An insightful series of articles on this problem appeared in the “Chicago Tribune” fifteen years ago. The series title was “A Nation of Strangers,” and the various installments had such disturbing titles as “America, the Rootless,” “Neighbors Anonymous,” and “A Fading Sense of Place.”  As one of the articles pointed out, “Many Americans are realizing, too late, that the [place-shifting] path to the good life has left them feeling empty.”

           The impact of such shallow association with place on our community life has been equally bad, as another article in that fourteen-part series revealed: “The loss of rootedness . . . means declining attendance locally, whether it be a PTA meeting, an election, or even a gathering of friends over a pitcher of beer. Instead of the volunteering, joining, getting-to-know-each-other, community-building citizens who once typified this nation . . . Americans have become privatized, atomized, focused within their property lines.”

            Television sets, DVDs, and computers---all of our modern connectors to mass culture---have surely contributed to that sociological shift.

            With that kind of alienation on the rise, we might pause to consider what is being lost, or threatened, in a spiritual sense. Renowned fiction writer Eudora Welty has speculated that the continuing loss of a sense of place “could destroy all [traditional] feelings . . . [for] so irretrievably and happily are recognition, memory, history, valor, love---and all the instincts of poetry and praise, worship and endeavor---bound up with place.”

            Indeed, to be truly at home in a community necessitates getting inside of it, becoming a living part of a living place---joined to that location by lines of awareness and appreciation that are simply beyond the experience of those who visit or just stay for a limited time. And in our era of increasing mobility and social drift, such meaningful self-development is not automatic. One must choose to remain, and interact, and belong.

            For Garnette and me, when we return every April, the delights of choosing this town always include our long walks in familiar places---to see the dark green lawns, the bright yellow forsythia bushes, the white-petaled flowering trees, the stunning daffodils and tulips---together with our wonderfully busy schedule of lunches and dinners with old friends, our sharing of “news” on the sidewalks and in the coffee shops, and our enthusiastic re-engagement with various civic and cultural groups.

            It is not surprising that through our annual pattern of temporary relocation to a winter residence on the Gulf Coast, Garnette and I have come to realize that spending time in Florida---as enjoyable as that is when January comes around in Illinois---always means that we have to leave part of our identity behind, for we are unalterably bound up with our town (and our state). No wonder the weeks following our return are full of intense satisfactions, and almost exhilarating re-connections---which amount, on the deepest level, to a renewed sense of our own complex reality.