- In 2022 my wife and I uprooted our lives and started moving for work.
- She is a traveling physical therapist and her contracts are for 13 weeks.
- Just because we move around a lot, doesn’t mean we don’t feel at home.
Three months ago, my wife and I were looking at the living room of a new house in new condition. It was the first day of living in the Pacific Northwest. In a few months, we will repeat this process in another part of the country, as we have done three times in the last two years and will continue to do for the foreseeable future.
In 2022, my wife and I decided to uproot our lives in Kansas City and move across the country for her job as a travel physical therapist. Her contracts are 13 weeks, and while she sometimes has the option of extending them, we never stay more than a few months.
Since we started, we’ve lived in Sonoma, California; Farmington, New Mexico; and now, Tacoma, Washington.
We loved our house
Before we traveled, we always found a lot of comfort and joy in our home. We decorated it to match our personalities with art made by friends, pieces found at thrift stores, and linens. Not to mention, Kansas City was where I grew up. Our family and friends were there, we knew exactly where to get a good meal, we had mapped out running routes and memorized the fastest way from point A to point B. Kansas City was safe because it was home.
That sense of home was something I thought we had lost when we started traveling. While the bungalow in Sonoma was quite cozy and pleasant, it felt like we were living someone else’s life, surrounded by furnishings that weren’t ours. Little by little, though, I began to look forward to walking in the front door. Sonoma started to feel like home. Admittedly, we had more time to adjust to Sonoma, as my wife extended the contract twice, but just as quickly as we got there, it was time to go again.
We experienced culture shock
We went home to Kansas City for a few months, where we were fresh off a new engagement and spending the holidays with family and friends. Then, he went to Farmington, which was a bit of a culture shock. Farmington was more rural than we were used to; our new apartment felt like a hotel and it was hard to find a restaurant or cafe that wasn’t a chain. I was worried that I wouldn’t settle in before it was time to leave again, but to my surprise, this is actually where I learned more about what home really meant.
While Farmington itself never felt like home like Sonoma or Kansas City, I still felt the same peace there as I did in other places. Over time, home changed from a physical location to a feeling. Where we found home in a building and its furnishings, we began to find it in each other and in our dogs, in the routines we kept and the relationships we maintained despite the distance.
Our thinking had to change because we no longer have the same control over our environment as we once did. It was a really comforting realization that home could be anywhere, and by the time we got to Tacoma, we were seasoned pros.
I want to warn that it is not unusual to find comfort in physical places or things. Of course there are still things we have to carry with us on every move, but there’s a sense of freedom we’ve found in home being more than a place or the things that fill it.
It has opened up possibilities that we would never have considered before, and adventures that previously outside of our comfort zone feel within reach. I can’t say where we’ll be next, but it doesn’t scare me like it used to. This freedom is something I never would have found without our traveling lifestyle, and I’m not sure I’d ever want to give it up.
While it will always be a little difficult to walk into a new house in a new condition, it has become even more difficult to leave after the contract is up. With each new place, our sense of belonging expands.
We may move every three months, but I’ve never felt more at home.