Finding Home

In the first line of my journal this morning, written on a flight from BWI to LAX, I wrote that I was headed “home,” to California. I paused for a good minute, reading it once, twice, as many times as it took until it didn’t look odd.

I didn’t intend to call it home. It just came out, as strange phrases, ideas, problems, and solutions often do when free-writing in a journal. A Freudian slip, perhaps. California has been where I’ve lived for almost five years now. It’s where I spend most of my days and nights, where my livelihood is, where I met my wife and have made my life as I currently know it.

But to call it home was nonetheless strange, for me. Little about California feels like home. Little about California is what I desire to be home.

Home has always been – in my mind, anyway – Hampstead, Maryland. It’s where I was raised for 23 years, where both of my brothers and sisters-in-law are, where my parents still live in my childhood home – “the cottage,” as we have affectionately dubbed it. So much about Maryland still feels like home, and so much does not.

I can drive through that little town without thinking, my hands and feet working the car while my mind runs through memories of my childhood’s past. The nostalgia runs thick as honey. Meeting up with my friends, many of whom I have known since before we could walk or talk, at their new houses with their new wives is still as easy as a Sunday morning. Some, I haven’t seen in years, and yet we can talk and be with one another as if it was just yesterday that we went out, all of us single and rambunctious, far too late in Fed Hill.

Nothing has changed. Everything has changed.

Now they all have kids. Houses. It’s an entirely new level of joy, to see my friends as doting parents, to see miniature versions of them toddling around, hiding shyly behind the legs of mom and dad, showing off new front flips in the pool, eyeing planes and trains with wide-eyed fascination.

That is home, truly.

Inevitably, and invariably, the question arises, then: When are you coming home?

Truth is, I don’t know. Uncertainty has ruled the throne of my life since I made the decision to move from Maryland. I don’t mean that in a bad way, either. It’s a thrill, one that isn’t for everyone, but one that I find a bit addicting. Never would I have predicted, as a high school student, that I’d live in Florida, then California. I wouldn’t have predicted that I’d play beach volleyball, or write on it, or let it take me around the world. I certainly couldn’t have predicted that I’d one day live in a garage.   

A big part of me wants to provide my friends and family with a sure answer, that I’ll be home soon. I want to want that answer, to be honest, but at the moment, I don’t. There is no magnetic pull to Maryland, or New Orleans, or the Carolinas, or anywhere outside of California, as much as I’d like there to be. Not yet, anyway.

It’s inexplicable, that pull. On the surface, I abhor almost everything there is about California. I loathe the too-big government, with its taxes that knock the wind right out of me every April; the pervasive macro culture of political correctness and safe spaces and cancel everything that might offend; the hypocritical nonsense where it is lauded to champion certain cultural issues yet scorn those with the audacity to stand for our National Anthem.

I do not like that I don’t want to move yet. But I cannot ignore the strange sense of gravity that keeps me here. What exactly that gravity is, I don’t know for sure. Perhaps it’s the community of friends I’m surrounded by. It is difficult to imagine a life, at the moment, without people like Katie Spieler and Jordan Cheng and all my regular training groups in it. It is difficult to imagine a life, at the moment, where I am not challenged, every day, as I am by those friends, and by this sport, and by my role of writing within it.

There’s a purpose, a mission, in those challenges and roles.

Perhaps that’s it, then: That’s home.

Home, the motif goes, is where the heart is, but what happens when your heart is in so many places? When it’s in the rainy suburbs of New Orleans, and the cornfields of Maryland, and a golf course with your brothers?

Maybe home is where the challenge is, and where challenge is, I’ve found, there’s purpose. With purpose comes, not complacency, but a sense of knowing that you’re in the right spot. There is no shortage of that in California.

It has been more than six years since I initially moved from Maryland. For the first six, it was always the one question I was routinely asked: “When are you coming home?”

Now there’s another, tethered to the original: When are you and Delaney gonna pop one out?

We don’t know. Later, rather than sooner, for sure. Delaney is playing the best volleyball of her life, in my opinion. She’s 24 (for six more days, anyway). There is no hurry there.

But when that day comes, perhaps there will be a new magnetic pull, a new gravity, somewhere else. Certainly, there will be a fresh crop of challenges. I’ve spent enough time around all of my friends who are new parents to know that children provide plenty of those.

In that, there is what I find to be the highest purpose, the highest calling we have as human beings: raising a better generation of ourselves.

Maybe then, I’ll have an answer, to where home is.