Putting down roots in shifting soil

My generation has been lucky in many ways; I have benefited enormously from the shrinking of the globe, the communications revolution and the flexible economy – it has enabled me to travel, meet my wife, work in a wide variety of interesting jobs and stay in touch with friends many different places.

But, at the same time, the rapidly changing and increasingly fragmented world imposes its costs. In his book The Corrosion of Character, the sociologist Richard Sennett argues that with careers spanning many different locations and employers, people in America are finding it increasingly difficult to construct a unifying personal narrative about who they are and what they do.

I too have found it hard to develop a clear storyline of my life – the many pieces of the jigsaw puzzle are not easy to match up when I have moved five times and worked for five different employers in the last two years. My life, and the lives of many people my age, struggles to fit into the accepted genres of previous generations.

For instance, when asked where I am from, I answer, “I’m half English and half American.” It never ceases to amaze me how many people find this difficult to grasp, reacting with, “You can’t be both” or “Which do you like more?” or “How does that work?”

Part of the problem is that many people no longer fit into the old set of neat, orderly boxes in which we once categorized people. I have a friend who describes herself as ‘Bolivicanese’ – the daughter of a Bolivian father and Chinese mother, born and raised in the USA.  Another friend is part Colombian, part   Italian, part Iranian, grew up in California and is now married to a Norwegian guy.

In order to understand our increasingly diverse and changing world, we will need to become more comfortable with complexity and ambiguity.

It is less easy to divide the world into easy, dichotomous categories – we have to be on our toes, constantly aware of the myriad fragments of meaning and identities that shape us.
But sometimes I feel that rather than being a book, elegantly narrated and slotted into an ongoing series of family volumes, my life story is like a pile of small scraps of paper, each with a fragment of the plot. I fear that, lacking the weight of a binding to enfold and protect the pages, a strong gust could scatter them to the wind.

I long to be rooted, to have a sense of belongingness, a bond to the past and insight into an uncertain future.

Last week, I was told that my English grandmother was extremely ill and in the hospital. I flew through the night to be at her side, as she struggles against her infections. She seems to be slightly better this week, but we continue to worry.

Beyond the difficult prospect of losing a family member and friend, I am afraid of losing a very real, tangible connection to a specific place. I worry that when she is gone, I will no longer feel as strong a sense that I am rooted in a family that once eked out a living from the rocky soils of northern England.

As I drive myself along the narrow winding lanes, over foreboding hills and green valleys, through villages of stone and slate, as I breath in the acrid air of coal fires and feel the dampness rising in my bones, I tried to soak it all in. I want every particle of the place to infuse itself into my body, to become a part of me so that I can become a part of it all.

Yet, each time I open my mouth and my strange creole accent blurts out – a bizarre mix of northern American and southern English, so foreign to the local brogue – I know that I am a stranger even in this, my own land.

And even if I had stayed in one place my entire life, the world changes so rapidly I would become a stranger – to contemporary culture, to new technology, to the changing landscape – without going anywhere.

Perhaps in this is the inkling of a new narrative that can connect the wide diversity of experiences in the 21st century – the experience of being a stranger, the journey of discovery, the attempt by all of us to find a sense of meaning and belonging in the fleeting nature of the present.

If each generation has to answer a question, perhaps ours is to discern what it means to put down roots in shifting soil.