Freedom needs home

“I wondered, "Why have I been chasing happiness

my whole life when bliss was here the entire time?”

― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“I have a great job, wonderful family, caring parents… But for about a year almost every day I feel like the life is just passing by me. What’s wrong?” “Sometimes I really want to quit my life here, to leave everything and to go somewhere far away, to start a new life…” “Why did we break up? I don’t know… Listen, I wanted something new, someone new around, I knew every single word he would say! I need new relations; I want to start from the very beginning…” The internet is overflowing with such complaints, explanations, and declarations. People are telling their stories and asking for advice. And there are tons of very helpful offers: “10 ways to chase a new direction in your life”, “You don’t need a vacation. You need a new life”, and even such easy-to-use instruction as “How to begin a new life: 10 steps (with pictures!)”.

New. Fresh. You have never tried it before. Commercials like to play with these words a lot, because the notion of “novelty” often works on consumers like a red rag to a bull. New things always have a color of unknown and for a lot of people this idea is perceived as more intriguing than dangerous. “A newborn baby would stare at a new image for an average of 41 seconds before becoming bored and tuning out on repeated showings — that’s how hard-wired our affinity for novelty is”. In the psychology book New: Understanding Our Need for Novelty and Change behavioral science writer Winifred Gallagher explores the biological, psychological, and cultural roots of this odd yet not thoroughly examined, but fairly common “disease” as Neophilia. I actually had not the slightest idea about this “virus” when I suddenly found out that I am suffering from it.  

It was in Chicago, December 2011, on Christmas Eve. I had a huge month-long vacation, and went travelling around the USA for 30 days. Alone with a small backpack, I visited 7 cities in 30 days, stayed in 7 different hostels living with about 60 new, different people, rode about 3,000 miles by 7 different buses, got lost in a deserted old cemetery, accidently found myself in the ghetto, nearly got arrested by police, and had millions of new impressions and experiences. Chicago was the last stop before I came back to Minneapolis to celebrate New Year’s with my friends. It was a nice day, sunny and a little bit windy; I was walking by the lake shore and thinking about my wonderful trip. And suddenly, I realized that I was tired. Not physically and not because of walking, but tired in general, tired of being alone, tired of being free.

That is how I found words and descriptions for these two parts of my personality that did not balance in my life. Freedom and Home. Two opposite poles. Each of them has both highs and lows. Home is a security, constancy, a confidence, and a strong image of tomorrow. It is a tranquility of a planned week and a planned life; it is stability and comfort. Everything and everyone around is familiar and intimate, and comfortable because of being known and immutable. However, Home is monotony to a certain degree, a routine, a beaten path. You know exactly what will happen tomorrow at 5 pm, what you will eat, and where you will find your socks. Home is an attachment to other people and even some sort of dependence on them; it is about duties and responsibilities. It is about reasoning. It is about a single rail.

Freedom is about unpredictability; it is the romance of a novelty and of uniqueness. You are responsible only for you and you are free to do whatever you want to. You do not have to explain your actions to anyone or adjust your plans to someone else’s ideas or wishes. Freedom is new and unexplored things every day, new roads and unknown places. It is when you do not know what will happened to you tomorrow, when you roam about the street of a new city without a plan or a map or suddenly decide to go to a museum and then spend a whole day there. It is when you can change your plans drastically and choose the opposite direction; when you are not tied by a promise to someone, when you do not have to think about your commitments to anyone; when you cannot offend or hurt anyone with your actions. Because there is no one too close. And that is a dark side of Freedom: it is a complete and infinite loneliness. There is no one next to you to share your emotions and your impressions, no one to show your shining eyes. Freedom is also about everyday stress, everyday leaving of the zone of your comfort and peace. You have just gotten used and adapted to a new city, discovered your favorite parks and cafés, memorized the streets and roads, invented the strategies of surviving. You have just started feeling comfortable and suddenly your time here is over and you are again on the way to the next destination. Again new places, unfamiliar routes and streets, foreign cafés and unexplored parks.

Yes, such a lifestyle trains you to be flexible and strong, hardens your psychological system. Now it is mere a child’s play for me to find out anything anywhere (even without knowing the language): from “Where is a White House? Really? This tiny building over there?” to where to buy condoms. Now, I can become friends with anyone in 5 minutes and build romantic relations in an hour, to pack my backpack in 10 minutes with all necessary things and to survive in a big city with 5 cents in a pocket. I became very independent and courageous, but…tired. I am tired of this huge torrent of new information and emotions every day when you permanently live at the breaking point. I found out that you can get tired from a novelty and from Freedom. That is a moment when you want to go Home with its strict plans, commitments, duties, promises and deadlines. Our mind needs systematization and structuring of the world around, otherwise, we would go mad very quickly from all that diversity and uniqueness of the things. But time passes and you get bored again, you want to leave Home behind and to seek for a novelty and Freedom.

How to find a balance between our need for safety and stability and our desire for novelty and unexplored areas? When started working on that essential psychological imbalance, I was looking for answers everywhere from science to religion, from close friends to unknown people in the internet. I got completely lost in the labyrinths of psychological terms, notions and descriptions. “Thrill and adventure seeking”, “experience seeking”, “disinhibition”, “boredom susceptibility”. While according to Buddhists, all the conditional states of life are dukkha, a word that Bhikkhu Khantipalo in his book Wat Buddharangsee defines as “signified the subtle qualities of unsatisfactoriness and uncertainty connected with change in life”. Basically, it appears there is no chance to escape from changings in life and to stop suffering.

The main problem with novelty is that after some time it becomes routine as well and you have to find something else again. There is an old myth about a woman who fell in love with a bird, caught her, and placed her in a cage. Right away, she lost her interest in this bird because she loved it only when the bird was flying in the sky.

Most of the books and pages on the internet give you various descriptions of symptoms and deep reflections on the reasons of neophilia but I did not find any prescriptions. If you ask a pharmacist to give you a medicine for neophilia, the answer will be, “Sorry, but we cannot help you, sir, you are on your own with that”. I suppose, everyone finds his own best way of surviving in conditions of permanent imbalance between Freedom and Home. Some people try to find novelty in their stability, in their routine. I read about a father who had five little children. He had to iron a lot of swaddling clothes every day so he invented a game to iron them in different ways in the shortest possible time. You can try to find new emotions and experiences on every step of your life: new movies, books, games, people you meet at cafés, clothes, flavors, etc. At the same time you stay responsible, stable and reliable.

You can choose the opposite direction as well. As my sister once told me, “if you really need new things and new impressions all the time to be happy, then live your life, change everything every 3 months, choose the profession that allows you to change jobs as often as you want, change partners or husbands, change places, change hobbies. Be yourself.” If you feel that it is the only way for you to be happy, then live that way. One of my friends from Texas teaches English and changes counties and workplaces every year. He is 35 years old and he does not want to settle down. Or you could find a person as crazy as you are and live that wonderful Freedom life with him or her. One Russian family created a blog where they share their feelings about the way they have lived for the past two years. They have three children between 5 and 10 years old and they move every month or two to another country. The husband has his own business and works distantly through the internet or on a phone and Skype, while the wife writes books. They have been to 15 countries already and they do not want to stop living this way.

After all this, I still do not have an answer to the question about the struggle between Freedom and Home. Maybe, it’s just somewhere in my house, or perhaps I have to look for it on the other side of the Earth. If you find a new medicine, please, let me know.