A Letter On Finding Home Wherever You Are
My Dearest Friend,
I have learned something about home that I didn’t understand when we first started moving — something that took time, repetition, and a fair amount of humility to recognize.
For a long time, I believed home arrived all at once. That one day, without warning, a place would simply feel like home — familiar, rooted, easy. I imagined a clear moment of arrival: a line crossed, a quiet certainty, the sense that we had reached somewhere that would hold us.
But this life rarely offers clarity like that.
We arrive. We orient. We begin again.
Just as routines start to take shape, just as a place becomes legible, we are often already counting time in the other direction. And more often than not, I find myself realizing how much a place mattered only as I begin to loosen my grip on it — only once leaving is no longer theoretical.
On Learning the Shape of a Place
I have noticed this: home does not begin with affection. It begins with familiarity.
It announces itself quietly. In small, almost forgettable moments. The first time I can drive somewhere without checking directions. The first morning I wake up and don’t have to rehearse how the day will work. The moment the landscape stops feeling like something I must navigate carefully and starts feeling like something I know how to move within.
That kind of knowing doesn’t arrive with ceremony. It accumulates.
And it cannot take root if I am still living somewhere else in my mind.
This doesn’t mean erasing what came before, or loving former places any less. It means noticing when memory turns into dwelling — when comparison, wishing, and quiet grief begin to crowd out presence. When that happens, I stay oriented to what was, instead of allowing myself to learn the shape of what is.
Home needs room to form. Sometimes the bravest thing we do is allow ourselves to be fully present where our feet are planted, even when we know this place will not hold us forever.
On Movement, Not Waiting
There have been places I expected only to endure. Assignments labeled temporary, transitional, something to move through on the way to real life. And yet, when we chose to live fully inside them — when we unpacked without reservation, learned the rhythms, showed up before we felt ready — those places surprised us.
They became home not because they were exceptional, but because we stopped hovering at their edges.
For me, home forms when life no longer feels like a constant problem to solve. When engagement shifts from effort to motion. When I stop asking where I belong, because I am already moving with some ease inside the life that is unfolding.
Waiting — for the right house, the right people, the right length of assignment — keeps us standing just outside the days we are already living. This place may not be permanent. It may not resemble what we imagined. But it is still ours to inhabit honestly, attentively, and without apology, for as long as we are here.
And that matters, whether or not we give ourselves credit for it in the moment.
The Lesson
Home is not something that happens to us. It is something we learn — slowly, unevenly, often without realizing it until later.
We learn it by moving through a place often enough that it begins to hold us in return. By allowing routine, connection, and familiarity to grow without demanding permanence. By choosing presence over postponement, even when it would be easier to stay half-turned toward what comes next.
We do not have to wait until we are leaving to acknowledge that a place has held us.
To the Spouse Who Isn’t Sure When Home Happened
If you are standing somewhere between arrival and goodbye — still learning this place, or only just beginning to realize how much it has held you — I want you to hear this gently:
You are not late.
Some of us recognize home gradually, as we learn the routes and rhythms and allow a place to matter. Others only realize it all at once, when boxes reappear and departure dates settle into the calendar. Neither is a failure. Neither means you did this wrong.
You are allowed to let this become home, even now — even if you are already preparing to leave it. You are allowed to invest without guarantees, to grieve what surprises you, and to honor what this place has quietly given.
Home does not require roots that never move. Sometimes it reveals itself only when we are finally still enough — or honest enough — to see it.
