Rootless -- like a rolling stone

I have always been a bit intrigued by the saying that a rolling stone gathers no moss.  Unlike most folk sayings that value perseverance and stolidness, this one encourages people to shake things up and not to let themselves grow stale (and perhaps let their minds get dulled).  It is a bit odd because by extension, it suggests that one should not be too tied down by traditions, which is certainly not the lesson of most folk wisdom.  Long before I was really aware of Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone," I enjoyed Heinlein's tale of the Stone family and their resourceful, no-nonsense Granny, Hazel Stone.

I have not gone back to read this since I was 18 or so (and most likely I read it last when I was about 15).  It's somewhat doubtful I would find it as entertaining now, but I suppose one never knows.  Obviously, I never went on to pilot my own ship through the meteor belt, which was a huge disappointment.  Why bother with a Back to the Future hoverboard when you can fly through space?  On the other hand, I didn't have to deal with proto-Tribbles either, so there you go. (While the cover probably was painted after the famous Star Trek episode, the book itself predates Star Trek by over a decade and the writers "ripped off" Heinlein (with his permission) and not the other way round.)

At any rate, I am one of the more truly rootless people I know.  It's hard to know exactly where this came from, though probably I am following in the footsteps of my father, who moved quite a bit when we kids were young (4 different states before I was 5) but then settled down in Michigan for a long stretch while we were in school.  And this is less actual moving around that most military brats experience for sure.  But the general outlook that one picks up and moves for job opportunities (or because one is ordered to) seeped in fairly deep.  No question I mostly associate with and understand academics, who are a transient lot early in their careers and then later when they have more leverage, rarely hesitate to move to better opportunities (which can cause no end of familial strife if partners don't buy into this outlook).  After we were out of high school, my father in fact moved to Pennsylvania and then two years after that to North Carolina.  The fact that most academics are transplants with relatively minimal grounding in their surroundings makes this upheaval easier. And many college towns have a certain sameness to them that makes the transition a bit more seamless (the same kinds of coffee shops and used bookstores and other stores that cater to perpetual students). 

There is no question that many (and probably most) academics consider their community to be the community of researchers spread across the country (and globe) and they have stronger ties to people they may have never met face to face than to people in the neighborhoods in which they live.  Here, I am just stealing shamelessly from Georg Simmel's The Web Of Group Affiliations (yes! the first time I've managed to work him into this blog, but it probably won't be the last).  This is easier today than it was in Simmel's day, and -- provided I stay in email contact -- I absolutely feel closer to people I may only see once a year at a conference than to the neighbors down the street, with whom I barely interact.  But it isn't an entirely new thing, even while Simmel was writing (in the early 1920s).  Hundreds of years ago, the highly educated were rare, and if they didn't find themselves rising through the ranks in the Church or manage to attach themselves to a royal court, they might well become a kind of itinerant scholar, looking for places where they might stay for a year or two and tutor the local elite.  I often see myself (and the whole consultant industry) as largely following in that tradition.  Of course, this was a difficult, troublesome life, and, ultimately, most scholars preferred to settle down and found universities and have the students come to them.  

Interestingly, geographic mobility gradually decreased in Europe and it was Americans who became known for moving state to state in search of jobs and the overall history of the U.S. is marked by migration after migration: the pioneers moving West, the Okies fleeing the Dust Bowl, the Black migration north (two waves), the wholesale relocations caused by W.W. II and the growth of military installations largely in the Southern states, the continued movement south and west and emptying out of the Rust Belt, to say nothing of various waves of immigrations that transformed America.  While this is far from my area of specialty, I am intrigued by the relatively recent transformation of Europe (or at least the full EU members) due to the creation of the borderless Schengen Area and the ability of EU citizens to move to other countries for work.* 

I do sometimes wonder if I take this rootlessness to its extreme limits.  As it happens, to satisfy a bureaucratic whim (if this post weren't already going to be so long, I would throw in some Max Weber at this point), I have to list all places I've lived as an adult (roughly 20 years' worth of addresses).  For some people, this might not be a challenge, but I have now compiled the list, and, in the last 20 years, I have lived at 15 distinct addresses, 6 different cities and in 3 different countries.  Definitely a case of extreme mobility.  While a good portion of the moves were related to work, it suggests a willingness to cut ties and certainly not valuing stability for its own sake.  This might actually make it harder to get Nexus clearance, to say nothing of gaining Canadian Permanent Residency...

What does all this rushing around get us?  Well, in many cases it can lead to better job opportunities, though some of these moves were more or less lateral transfers.  The move to New York, the move to Cambridge, UK and the move to Vancouver all translated into more responsibilities and better job titles, even if not always more money.  Mobility feeds the desire for novelty, which is something that seems to matter to me.  Given that I live in most new cities 2-3 years, it means gaining a reasonable understanding of each place, even if not a deep understanding that long-term residents have.  It may or may not lead to more acceptance of the transience of things.  It might even work the other way, as I come back for visits to find my favorite stores and restaurants gone.  Of course, time (and the march of capitalism) did a real number on Chicago's Lakeview neighborhood -- while I was still living there -- with a huge number of my favorite haunts, esp. used CD shops, destroyed in 3 years.  That actually made it easier to move away from Lakeview.

One thing that to me is a positive about rootlessness in general, though it may not be to most people, is that I live like a tourist.  I never assume I will be living in a place longer than 2 or 3 or so years, so I try to go to all the museums and (the better) touristic sites on a routine basis.  This also means scanning the papers to know what is on, much like one would do if coming to town for a weekend.  I suspect it does mean appreciating places (while I am there) more than the natives and certainly doing more out and about on the town.

But these are basically trivialities.  It doesn't get at the real meaning of rootlessness and certainly not the cause of it.  Thoreau would certainly not be impressed with my approach to life.  One of the more profound (and most quoted) sections of Walden is "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For," from which I have extracted this passage: 

The nation itself, with all its so-called internal improvements, which, by the way are all external and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrown establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps, ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation and a worthy aim, as the million households in the land; and the only cure for it, as for them, is in a rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan simplicity of life and elevation of purpose. It lives too fast. Men think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not; but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain. If we do not get out sleepers, and forge rails, and devote days and nights to the work, but go to tinkering upon our lives to improve them, who will build railroads? And if railroads are not built, how shall we get to heaven in season? But if we stay at home and mind our business, who will want railroads? We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.  ... Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry. Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches today to save nine tomorrow. As for work, we haven't any of any consequence. We have the Saint Vitus' dance, and cannot possibly keep our heads still.

 
Keeping myself busy partly stems from wanting to live a life that is full of enrichment (museum visits, concerts, plays) but also suggests a need to distract myself from things that are bothering me (feeling I am rushing into The Void probably being the number one in the background).  The rootlessness is slightly different but probably speaks to an unwillingness to settle down and a general unhappiness.  Looking at each situation, I can see reasons for each move.  And indeed, I would most likely have stuck in New York at a job I enjoyed, but left for family reasons.  In all other cases, either the job really failed to live up to my expectations or I found myself with "issues" over the setting.  In a lot of ways, the job in Vancouver has lived up to my expectations and in some cases exceeded them, but I am finding that I am not in love with the city and the general climate is dragging me down.  It is actually far worse for my wife who actively hates it here.  And yet I am worried about jumping into the unknown again, since it would be nice to settle in one place at least for the kids to go through school (largely) in one place.

I may return to the subject or feel it is more or less played out at the moment.  I do want to add some comments by a writer who understood (or at least accepted) the psychological craving for movement and novelty in a way that Thoreau did not (just as Simmel often has a better handle on people's motivations than Marx certainly).  William Alexander Gerhardie drew on his own experiences growing up in pre-Revolutionary Russia in his first novel Futility.  One of the more ridiculous characters (a writer who is afraid to commit his thoughts to paper) finally reveals his thoughts and there is a certain profundity to them, and even if he is deceiving himself while rushing about, the deception itself is what allows him to go on (in a Beckettian sense).  I certainly recognize myself on this treadmill, and think with this it is finally time to leave the subject of mobility for the time being.  I have edited the dialogue into a monologue for clarity:

‘Well,’ said Uncle Kostia, and his face became that of a mystic. ‘I thought, for instance—I wonder if you will understand me ?—I thought: Where are we all going? ...  There are no motives, The motives are naught. It is the consequences. Where are we going? Why are we going? Look: we are moving. Going somewhere. Doing something. The train rushes through Siberia. The wheels are moving. The engine-drivers are adding fuel to the engines. Why? Why are we here? What are we doing in Siberia? Where are we heading for? Something. Somewhere. But what? Where? Why? …  What I was saying was that we all behaved as if we were actually doing things, boarding this Trans-Siberian Express as if in order to do something at the end of the journey, while actually the journey is in excess of anything we are likely to achieve. ... Now it is different. We are moving, apparently doing something, going somewhere. One has a sense of accomplishing something. I lie here in my coupé and I think: It is good. At last I am doing something. Living, not recording. Living! Living! I look out of the window, and my heart cries out: Life! Life! and so living, living vividly, I lapse into my accustomed sphere of meditation, and then before I know exactly where I am I begin to meditate: Where are we all going to? Isn’t our journey the kernel of absurdity? And so, by contrast, as it were, I gain a sense of the importance of meditation—That is how we deceive ourselves, Andrei Andreiech.’

* A good summary of recent research on European mobility can be found in this article by Favell and Recchi. Favell also wrote a pretty good book on mobility of younger Europeans in "elite" occupations (Eurostars and Eurocities: Free Movement and Mobility in an Integrating Europe), which I could relate to quite a bit, as in general I have a lot in common with the individuals he interviewed -- to saying nothing of the fact that I actually worked at a UK firm that had quite an international flavour in its workforce.  Two other promising, recent books that take a wider look European mobility (and presumably pay more attention to the lower end of the occupational ladder) are Migration and Mobility in the European Union by Christina Boswell and Andrew Geddes and Migration and Mobility: the European Context ed. by Subrata Ghatak and Anne Showstack Sassoon.  If I find out they aren't as good as they appear on the surface, I will come back and fix these recommendations.