Finding home

I rarely ever hear songs by The Afters, but I happened to hear one this week that struck me as kind of up my alley. I don't actually remember much of what the song sounded like, but I looked up the lyrics when I got home because I was pretty sure that the words intrigued me. Either that, or I'd heard them totally wrong. But no, I'd heard them right.

"The World's got me tied on a string/Wanderlust has overcome me/Like Lewis and Clark I'll dream/There's a million different ways to go/Only God can know where I will call my home."

I actually have no idea what the point of this song is. I sort of get the impression that perhaps they wanted a few filler songs for a CD and just decided this one was good enough. Not that I dislike it, but I literally have no idea what the point of it is. It's called "Love Lead Me On" and the entirety of the chorus goes as follows: "Love lead me on/Where no one else has gone/Faith keep me strong/Love lead me on."

It also rambles about finding home, and love, and picture perfect sunsets, so I'm pretty sure it's just a feel-good song about finding home, but I mostly liked the lines about wanderlust and Lewis and Clark. One of my friends and I used to play Lewis and Clark (I'm pretty sure I was Lewis) and we were masterful waterfall jumpers. It was pretty swell.

I have a friend who is going to school to be a guidance counselor, and he's already pretty good at it. We'll be having a conversation and suddenly I'll realize that I'm just rambling about all sorts of stuff I normally wouldn't. It's rather unsettling, actually. That being said, I was talking about traveling the other day, and he asked me, "Do you get antsy if you stay in one place for too long?"

I had no idea what to tell him. I don't even remember the last time I stayed in one place for a long time. At least one weekend a month I'm somewhere else--anywhere else! And it's not that I don't love my family, or my home (because I love both, very much), but I'm just always doing other things on the weekends. It was odd for me to take a step back and look at myself the way others must see me. I know there are some people who think I'm out and about too much, that I should be home more.

But... I am pretty tight with my family. We eat two meals a day together, we discuss anything and everything whenever we have spare minutes, we travel places together when we get the chance, I ask my parents for advice about most things (even crazy-sounding things, so they can talk me out of it), and my siblings and I are incredibly close.

So, does my traveling a lot mean I'm escaping from something? Because I can't think of what I'd be running from, or what I'd be trying to run toward. My home is just that: Home. I wouldn't want to think I'm out trying to find another place to belong. I'm just out to find that perfect sunset, to play Lewis and Clark and make discoveries worth discussing at the dinner table.

I like to think of it like T. S. Eliot always said: "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."