You’ll Never Really Settle In

Whenever I moved somewhere new, the question: “How are you settling in?” used to bother me. What do you mean by that—the relationships? That our toilets are working? Figuring out where to buy your produce? Over time I’ve capitulated, and now I use the question like everybody else, as a default. The open-endedness of the question isn’t a flaw, it’s a feature. When asked in the right way, you cut someone a blank conversational check. You’re saying, “Moving to a new place is brutal. Talk to me about that.”

The question begs a deeper one: What’s the goal of settling in? It’s a feeling more than anything else—the feeling of home. Since the Covid reshuffling, we’re a whole country of immigrants. It’s easy for new arrivals to cast a wistful eye on longstanding locals, whom you figure must be vanishing into coffee shops and pubs like Diagon Alley. But if you stop to talk to one of these natives, you’ll discover they share your wistfulness. Their town is not what it was, and that’s often the harder change than moving to a new one. The question is: “When will it feel like home?” That’s the trouble. It never really will. At least not in the sense you want it to.

After you move to a new place, life can become more familiar, more patterned, but not home in the sense of bringing peace to your restlessness. The downside to an increasingly mobile existence is that another place, another location, another home is a more tempting solution, even though it will prove inadequate in the same ways.

C.S. Lewis puts his finger on this desire – a yearning homesickness – as the deepest human longing, and what eventually led him to Christianity. He describes it as “that unnameable something [the] desire for which pierces us like a sword at the smell of a bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World’s End, the opening lines of Kubla Khan, the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves.”

Lewis is trying to weave together glimpses of something we all seek perpetually without finding, or we find it for a moment before it slips like sand. It is something grand but simple, infinite yet accessible, adventurous but safe. It’s this sort of longing that lends potency to childhood nostalgia. We’re able to draw up our best memories, crop out the unpleasantness, and construct a picture of the past as ideal, protected from the uncertainties of the present.

But, as Lewis explains, the reason why we’re always homesick in this world is because we were made for another one. If we put too much pressure on a particular place (or a particular person) to fulfill and bring together all our longings, we will end up being continually disenchanted, disillusioned, grumpy, and ungrateful. The memories, places, and people that awaken homesickness in you aren’t home. They’re pointing you home to the One who made you.