Is staying the new leaving? For most of time you stayed where you started. If you were born in a region you lived in that region for your whole life, if you grew up in a specific town, city, or village most likely that’s where you spent your entire existence. Movement was more rare than it was normal because for most of time leaving and going to a distant place entailed so much more than it does now.
As we all know we now live in the most mobile culture that has ever existed. We don’t stay anywhere longer than fifteen minutes and have, in fact, developed a whole set of cultural norms to fit around our constant movement. Even more so today than in our parents (probably grandparents) generation because at least in that time you used to stay with the same job for most of your life (at the very least the same career field). Today we flitter like a butterfly from one place to the next, we go away to college, we go away to get married, we go away for vacation, we move away for jobs, we live in many houses in our one lifetime (we’re on house number six in just a few years of marriage!!!), we can go from one side of the country to the other and it’s considered normal.
Its come to the point where very few people even value where they are. We’ve lost our sense of neighborhood, our sense of localness. We drive to the church twenty minutes away, we commute to work thirty minutes away, we grocery shop ten miles away, our kids are in little league with other kids sprawled across the whole city, our friends are not our neighbors (generally) and in fact we’re lucky if we see or even know our neighbors in meaningful ways. Our commitment is not to the betterment of our immediate neighborhood but to individual success and growth (i.e. the next job that’s going to get me to the next house, etc.) Individuality and mobility can be good things but they do come with baggage, they bring some heavy losses.
I don’t mean to be a downer here but I think we’re missing something huge! I think we’re missing out on something that could quite possibly change not only our own lives but the fabric of a whole community. What would it take for us to commit to each other, to commit to a place, to commit to a people, to slow down, to shop closer to home, to not get our kids the school boundary exception, to walk more and drive less…what would it require of us? How much sacrifice would it invite us into? Honestly I’m afraid it requires a lot! I’m afraid that the sacrifice is pretty huge for many of us!
Mobility used to be hard…now its become stability that is the obstacle. Are we willing to experiment with the strangely old and yet radically fresh idea that, as one author says, there’s wisdom in stability? I think we’d be wise to do so.