When did you leave home? I mean REALLY leave home?
I boarded a bus just about a month before my 18th birthday for a recruiting station in Kansas City and I have never really gone home since. In the intervening years I have lived around the world (Viet Nam to Iceland and points in between) had incredible experiences and met amazing people. Oh, I visited my parents and with siblings at special events in our shared home town but I have never felt the pull to return to my small Missouri (Humansville) town or to its small ways. Other than the brief occasional cemetary visit to honor my parents I have not "gone home" in nearly 20 years.
"You Can't Go Home Again" is a novel by Thoma Wolfe. The phrase has taken root in our language to communicate the idea that after seeing the bigger, more sophisticated world one cannot return to their provincial, small town ways of living and thinking. The same idea was popularized earlier in the 20th century by Eddie Cantor. The line from his well known song was, "How you gonna keep'em down on the farm after they've seen Paree?"
During my brief forays into the small town way of thinking I have found myself wondering, "Why?" Why do people with so much potential and talent not leave home? Didn't they aspire to more? Will they, someday, realize what they missed? People I knew long ago and people I have more recently come to know choose to give up on life and settle for less than they could have. Why? Why do people born in small towns find it so hard to think big?
Maybe home is a trap. Maybe Wolfe and Cantor were only half right in their assertions. The real problem is not whether you can go home again but whether you can escape your small town mindset at all. It might just be that the Eagles got it right about small towns and small thinking in the song "Hotel California." "You can check out at any time but you can never leave."
What about you? Have you left home yet? When will you?
Comments and thoughts appreciated. You can follow me on Twitter @drcamey.
