I Like What I Know and I Know What I Like

I’m aware that I’m not known for my love of change, but sometimes there’s a great relief—even to the most adventurous, well-traveled person—to come back to a place where one knows all the shortcuts around town and people’s back-stories. I feel like I could search every populated (definition of populated: more than one high school, mall, and highway where I can drive over 75 mph) area in the world and not find what I have now. Some people need to backpack across Europe for emotional clarity and others try to find themselves in places that are the complete opposite of what they came from, but my search for comfort and long-term happiness was easy; it was right where I left it.

One of my oldest friends, and an expatriate of the Good Ole Commonwealth of Virginia, came home to visit this past weekend. Always looking for a challenge, he said, “Doesn’t it bother you to come back after college and live less than 10 miles from where you grew up?” The short answer? No. But, I’m not one for short answers, so here’s the real scoop. If I had come from a town with one stoplight and mountain folk, maybe it would, but my return home has shown me more good in the area and residents of Fairfax, Virginia than I ever knew of or fully appreciated before I left for school. My complete answer to him would have to offer a bit of sentimentality. I get to live somewhere where I can remember that same little boy standing me up for the first 7th grade dance (yep, I lied when I said I forgave you) as well as someplace where I’m constantly making newer—less adolescently tragic, of course—memories.

I understand that returning to what you know may be too simple of an answer for most, but I think that the rightness of going native, per se, and returning to one’s roots depends on the past, present, and future of the location. If the place you have returned to is liquid and changes with the times just enough to stay fresh, you have a better chance of happiness, unless you’re like my grandma and really, really don’t like change. In addition to the ability of the area to advance and grow, you need to allow yourself to grow as well and revisit what you always knew with fresh eyes and the vigor of one arriving in a completely new location.

Consider the area as one that is rich with your own personal history. I take great joy in working mere blocks from where my parents first met in an elevator, passing old friends’ (parents’) houses when I take a short cuts around town, sitting at the bar at T.T. Reynold’s where my uncle worked over 20 years ago, and running into people that I haven’t seen in years and being happier to see them than I ever would have imagined.

People, by nature, just plain don’t change; however, the context in which you know them can. I’ve come home to most of my family, those I loved in the past, and those I wish I had known as well as I do now when we were growing up. I’m the luckiest girl alive because I can go out on a weekend and see what successes people from across the high school lunch room have become (or not—which is just as amusing); I can make up for the missed years of getting to know my 5th grade science partner and now next big thing in the world of photography, and set up my apartment with my new roommate and first friend in high school cheerleading. We all have a common ground from which we can tell each other new things. We’re able to speak from the same lexicon of experiences, places, and faces and understand each other without much explanation, regardless of how well we knew each other in the past.

I’m not asking that you reject change, but more that you don’t reject familiarity. It’s easy to make changes in what’s familiar, but it’s a struggle to find what’s familiar in change. Answers to our contentment in life aren’t simple, but sometimes they’re in the last place you look…right where you left them.