On Settling Down: My Experience Putting Down Roots on Cape Cod

When you live on Cape Cod, you have lots of houseguests in the summertime. I love this about living here, since so many of my loved ones live far away, and this summer, the experience of having visitors has taken on a whole new meaning because we now own our very first home. 

My dad and brother are visiting this week (not Patrick, the one that I just visited in Peru, the other one, Peter), and we got to show them our house for the first time yesterday. 

As we arrived at the end of our tour and walked out into the backyard, showing off things that we wouldn't have even noticed or been excited about a year ago ("Look at our new fence! Check out our garage!"), my brother, who lives in Manhattan, made a comment about how "tied down" we are now, how many responsibilities we have these days with our home, our mortgage, and our dog. 

When he said this, I had a flashback to when I lived in New York (or DC for that matter!) and used to go visit my friends who owned homes in Kentucky or Georgia. At the time, I saw their lives as totally foreign and couldn't imagine being in a living situation where I couldn't just pick up and leave, or where I didn't have the option to make a huge life change in the blink of an eye. 

But here's what I don't think I understood then and I don't think you can understand until you experience it yourself: Putting down roots isn't fun, exciting or comforting until you find a place where you want to put down roots, or until you have a life situation that you want to make permanent. [The yogi in me wants to note here that nothing is permanent and the only constant is change, but I think that the urge to try and hold on to a specific version of your life exists and shows up time and again for most of us.]

Did I love my life in New York and DC? Yes, I did. But did I love it so much that I wanted to buy a home and live there for an extended period of time/forever? No, I didn't (Even if we could have afforded it, which we most definitely couldn't have!). 

I don't mean to suggest that you have to buy a house to "settle down" or that you need to settle down in order to be happy, but that personally, I experienced a serious shift in how I felt about settling down when we moved to the Cape, and this shift triggered a response inside of me that said, "Here's a place where you should put down roots." 

Putting down roots or settling down will look different for everyone, but for me, a big part of feeling settled in this new place was buying a home so that we could paint the walls any color we wanted, hang something on a wall and know that it wouldn't have to come down + get wrapped in bubble wrap a year later, and get to know the surrounding roads, our neighbors, and our neighborhood on a deeper level. 

Over the years, I've experienced a similar transition in how I feel about other big life decisions: Marriage, having kids, getting a dog. For the longest time, I was scared of the idea of marriage and wanted nothing to do with it. Then at some point, after Ben and I had been together for about 6 years, I just started feeling ready and knew that it was time. Same with getting a dog; I never had any interest in owning a dog, and then one day, I started experiencing strong urges to take care of a little being, and started obsessing about getting a dog of our own. 

And although we're still not quite there yet, for years it felt like having kids was something I would think about in the far, far away future...until it wasn't anymore, and now it's something that we can see on the horizon and discuss often. 

So, I guess what I want to say about settling down is that for me, and for us, it has felt really good to put down roots and decide to make a specific part of the world our home. It wasn't something that I wanted until it was, and since then, it has become a very comforting and grounding part of my life.  

Although buying a house was symbolic of our decision to settle down in one place, I definitely don't think that buying a home is a necessary part of making the decision to put down roots. Instead, I think it involves making the mental shift that you're not going anywhere anytime soon, and that this town, city, state, country, or even person (!) is now what you think of when you think of home. 

For me, there's something really comforting about knowing where my home is and what that home looks and feels like. But I think that this shift might not have happened had I not lived in a bunch of places first, and experienced a lot of temporary homes that taught me about myself, what I want, and where I feel most comfortable.

What do you think? What does settling down look and feel like to you? What does home look and feel like to you? Something worth pondering...