As a man filled with wanderlust, I used to pity my parents for spending almost their entire lives in one city.  Where’s the adventure and glamour of staying put?  Now that I have spent the better part of my adult life in four different cities, I think I understand the upside of being the rock that gathers moss.

For all the glamour of mobility, it comes with a sense of disconnectedness.  Each time I’ve moved, I have had to start with a blank slate with all the relationships you usually take for granted.  Having a child magnifies this challenge, as anyone who’s had to find babysitters and piano teachers in new communities can verify.

Yes, we have all these great technologies to keep in touch – heaven knows how much Facebook has resurfaced grade school, high school, and college friends.  But these are facsimiles of the real thing.  A digital life stream is not a life.

I envy my parents for being able to run into their grade school friends at the grocery store.  I also envy the special friendship they share with the same six couples they’ve dined with on a monthly basis for the past 30 years.  All of their kids grew up together and the grandchildren are showing up all over the place.

You can’t see the depth and richness caused by these micro deposits of experience, but over a decade or two their mosaic beauty becomes apparent.  If you’ve lived in the same place for a long time, you might not appreciate the many layers of life you have accumulated.  I think it’s something we need to consider, celebrate, and cultivate.  More accurately, it’s something I want to cultivate in my life.

It seems the older one gets, the harder it is to forge deep friendships.  For me, the strongest bonds I forged was in the intense four years of college.  Those years were like a whole lifetime unto themselves.  We were all searching for our identities and challenging the notions our parents taught us before spreading out across the globe.

But as I entered the post-college world and have moved from suburb to suburb and school to school, I have found the depth of relationships getting thinner and thinner.   There are some exceptions to this rule, but it holds true for the vast majority of my perceived reality.  I know I’m not alone in this regard.

My question to you, dear reader (or bot), is how can we who have followed the meandering path capture the rich layers of life previously available to those staying put?  I don’t have the answer and hope you hold a part of it.

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Scott Henderson is managing principal of CauseShift, a team of strategists who help clients provoke, connect, and market. He has led shifts for a variety of organizations, including P&G, UNICEF, and wecanendthis.com, a yearlong, multi-partner initiative to spark innovation and engage more people in the cause of ending hunger in America. Scott is a regular keynote speaker and publisher of rallythecause.com

Tagged in: community, disconnectedness, hometown, migratory, wanderlust