Life Without the Kitchen Island

They speak of settling down, putting down roots, becoming established, getting serious, building a life. One must remain in one place long enough for the local climate to colonize one’s character. One must acquire the proper layers of adult legitimacy: the mortgage, the car, the storage unit, the recurring committee meeting, the holiday obligations, the increasingly obscure insurance products, the acquaintances one cannot quite remember inviting into one’s life.

A rolling stone, according to the old proverb, gathers no moss.

This is presented as a warning.

The trouble with moss is not that it is green. The trouble is that it is adhesive.

The rooted life has its dignities. Let no one pretend otherwise.

A long marriage can be a work of civilization. A neighborhood can teach patience. There is tenderness in knowing where the spoons are kept.

But there is a distinction the moss enthusiasts prefer not to make.

There is a difference between a root and a shackle.

There is a difference between home and custody.

The globally mobile life is often condemned by people who possess exactly one theory of seriousness: that seriousness requires visible heaviness. The serious person, in their view, has a fixed address, a calendar full of obligations, a garage full of evidence, and an expression suggesting that he has recently discussed refinancing.

The mobile person has none of the reassuring architecture. He has flights, bags, notebooks, files, a few rooms in a few cities. He appears, to the stationary imagination, suspiciously unburdened.

This is because people confuse *lightness* with lack of structure.

They do not see the systems concealed beneath the traveler’s shirt.

They see the coat.

A mobile life, if it is to be anything other than a long and expensive evasion, requires a garment of unusual construction. It must look light enough to wear through customs, but carry the weight of an entire private civilization. It must be elegant without being fragile. It must hold documents, capital, work, identity, health, memory, passwords, obligations, practical knowledge, and escape routes—without making the wearer look like a municipal archive.

The traditional life puts its structure in the building.

The mobile life puts its structure in the person.

This is a rather different form of wealth.

A house can contain a life, certainly. But a person can also become the house: portable, orderly, equipped with keys, competent enough to arrive in an unfamiliar city and locate food, water, work, shelter, language, and a reasonable place to sit before sunset.

This is not rootlessness. It is root transfer.

The roots have been moved from one ancestral garden into a set of living systems: health, work, assets, relationships, habits, skills, languages, taste, legal documents, correspondence, financial reserves, and a body of work that continues to speak when its maker is somewhere else entirely.

The mistake is to imagine that a person who does not own a single horizon owns nothing.

He may own optionality, which is less photogenic than a kitchen island but generally more useful when the world becomes strange.

It is, in short, the difference between wandering and having range.

The person with no base is vulnerable to the world’s moods. The person with one base may be vulnerable to the moods of that one place. The person with several carefully maintained nodes begins to possess a subtler sort of independence. He is not homeless. He is distributed.

The incoherent traveler changes cities and remains the same problem.

The coherent traveler changes cities and allows the world to become material.

That is the difference.

The accusation that a person is “always running” usually comes from someone who has never considered that there may be a difference between fleeing and ranging.

To flee is to move away from something one cannot face.

To range is to move toward a larger field.