BENEATH THE SKYLINE

SEEKING JOURNEY, MAKING HOME
A Glimpse of Young Adulthood

Deborah Good

I am reading a novel. In it, the author creates a little world of people whose lives weave into and out of each other. The newspaperman plays basketball with the brother of a woman who becomes his lover. This woman’s best friend is married to the newspaperman’s photographer. And the photographer and the basketball-playing brother meet regularly with the same Jewish organization.

The characters’ lives are interconnected as they visit each other, eat together, talk about each other, fight with each other, follow the happenings in each others’ daily lives. They may not always get along—they may not even be friends—but in their own odd, unintentional way, these six people are community.

Some days, all I want is my own little world of people. I want to feel at home somewhere—in a geographical place, in a small community of people, in a grounded way of thinking and living. Instead, I feel scattered. I know too many people in too many places who believe too many different things. Too many, too many, too many. And therein lies the bane and the richness of my young-adult existence.

In her book Big Questions, Worthy Dreams: Mentoring Young Adults in Their Search for Meaning, Purpose, and Faith (Jossey-Bass, 2000), Sharon Daloz Parks develops "journey" and "home" as prevailing metaphors in our lives. "The story of human becoming might best be understood as reflecting two great yearnings," she writes, "one for differentiation, autonomy, and agency, and the other for relation, belonging, and communion"—home (49).

And what do I mean by "home"? Home is, first of all, a place. It is the familiar braided rug in your parents’ living room. It is the stream that runs through the family farm. It is the crack in the sidewalk in front of 1800 Kenyon Street.

But home is more than location. It is a feeling of comfort and stability. Expectations are understood and people are constant. Dad always sits in the biggest chair, Beth’s always yelling something at somebody, Mom says the prayer before the meal, and, gosh-darnit, everyone better play Monopoly with Tommy afterward. And although no one asks about the meaning of life, most people in the group would have something similar to say. Home is a geographical place, a group of people, a faith tradition.

I find in my own life, and in the lives of many of my peers, a tension between our desire to explore new territory and our hunger for a sense of home. We read books with ideas that challenge the doctrines of our childhood—and then return to our home church for the annual Christmas hymn sing. We spend a year in an indigenous community in Peru, but we are relieved our parents haven’t moved anywhere when we get back. We spend our weekends visiting friends in various parts of the country, but in our search for community closer by, we start supper clubs and have keg parties. Even as we leave much of home" behind, we seek ways to create it wherever we are.

In a song called "Cathedrals," Jump, Little Children sings about times in life when "you get a feeling that you should just go home—and spend a lifetime finding out just what that is." These words capture what I think is a key challenge for many of us in my generation.

Last July, I sat around a professor’s deck with a group of my peers, discussing our stage of life. Sometimes I think young adulthood is like standing in a crowded room of loud people and being told to follow "that voice." We have a gazillion ideas of what our lives could look like and little idea how to get there.

So we meander about, bumping into each other, trying to make smart decisions, trying to pay our school debts and electric bills, still trying to discern what we believe, what we’re sure of in life—since somehow we graduated from college without figuring that out—and, mostly, trying to have a good time.

I turned 23 last month. When I reflect on the past few years of my life, I find it no wonder that I have a hard time knowing what to call "home." I am not sure about a lot of things, including what job I will have in three months. In the past five years, I have lived in twelve different housing situations, and I’m about to move again. My college classmates and I are constantly navigating the next decision-making episode, the next transition. Almost every other weekend, I am helping a friend move or attending someone’s wedding.

I wonder whether my feeling of homelessness was true of young adults in the past. In part, I think it was—this life stage is inherently full of transition. But technology and travel make my world bigger and more accessible than that of many a few generations ago. Exposure to such a wide variety of people, places, and experiences may have left my generation with less of a sense of home than our parents and grandparents.

This morning, I rolled out of bed and pulled on some clothes. It wasn’t until lunch time that I looked down and realized how much my outfit said about my relationship with the world: I bought my purple "Graceland" sneakers last month while visiting a friend in Germany. My long-sleeve top is from Guatemala where I spent a semester of college. And my necklace of dark brown beads was given to me by a friend who lived in India for several months.

In contrast, my 88-year-old grandmother has rarely left the state of Pennsylvania and recently wrote me a card saying, "You are brave to go so many new places, but I think I would rather stay home." After traveling some in young adulthood, most of her children have returned to live in Lancaster County, a short drive from the farm on which they were raised. I wonder where my cousins and I will end up.

Thirty years ago, my parents graduated from Eastern Mennonite College (now University), my alma mater. Their friends scattered to different parts of the country and world, like mine, and they wrote some letters but gradually lost touch with many of their classmates.

I, on the other hand, live in the age of cell phones and the Internet. I am connected to the world—and to people from my past—in a way my parents never experienced. As a result, my friends from high school and college and I write emails and talk on the phone to keep in touch. We visit each other regularly, sometimes driving long distances without thinking it excessive or unnecessary. This may sound like fun, but it also leaves me feeling untethered, scattered, homeless.

Also, I am not grounded in a faith tradition the way my parents were a generation ago. I grew up going to Sunday school and learning Anabaptist values from parents and relatives but am much slower to embrace fully any way of thinking and living.

As a child, the diversity of students in my D.C. public school classrooms taught me to be accepting of many kinds of people and to grant validity to different religious beliefs. As a college student, my friends and I watched "The Matrix," a movie that asks if what we believe to be real is in fact a deception, and we felt like it said something about our lives.

We are living in an era commonly characterized as "postmodernism," an era that defies definitions of truth and reality, and deconstructs foundational ideologies and moralities. In such a world, it is hard to feel at home in any one faith tradition.

I have loved my life’s journeys, but I am not content with homelessness. I have chosen to live in a bustling city of over a million people with no one else from my family, and to keep in touch with friends in many different places, but I am trying to create home even in my rather nomadic existence.

Next week, I move into an apartment with two good friends. I look forward to spending time there, filling the living room with furniture, decorating the walls with our things. I look forward to eating our meals around the kitchen table, debriefing together after our days at work, and being community for one another as best we know how.

Recently, I have also started meeting a good friend for breakfast once a week—one more way to build consistency amid scattered relationships. And although I say that I am slow to embrace a faith tradition, I still go to church on Sundays, seeking God and, even more, looking for somewhere to belong.

We are a generation of nomads, jumping from place to place and job to job. But if you look closely, we are also a generation scrambling for stability and community, seeking ways to make home.

—Deborah Good, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, graduated from Eastern Mennonite University in 2002 and is currently an intern at The Other Side magazine (www.theotherside.org). Since writing this article, she moved into an apartment in West Philadelphia with two friends where she is exploring the meaning of home.