Finding your true home
MM5: Part 2: How to learn where you belong
In Where Do You Belong (Mile Marker 5 Part 1), I argued why sense of place is essential. Part 2 is meant to help you understand your own sense of place and how to appreciate it, discover it, or adapt to it.
“Toto, I’ve a feeling we aren’t in Kansas anymore.”
How we lose our sense of place
We follow the money
As noted in Part 1, Alan Thein Durning said, “In America, we have careers, not places.” Fortunately, sometimes these journeys bring us to places of our dreams. Other times, we work in towns or cities that are not a good fit, but we have to earn a living, after all.
We follow the family
A lifelong commitment to another person usually means compromise. What is sometimes sacrificed for the other is the chance to live in places optimized for your well-being. Not too many people would choose a beloved place over a beloved person.
We follow the wrong values
Without really examining where, when, and why you have been happiest, you may get sucked in by a value system other than your own. Where you might have been happy living on less, you may find yourself desiring the “more” that your neighbors have. While the amenities of the city streets might be convenient, you may secretly yearn to look up at trees, not skyscrapers.
When you're not rooted in place, there's often a quiet sense that something is missing—so subtle, you might not even notice it.
The Hero and the Fork in the Road
As I've learned researching this topic, not many people write about a sense of place. We defend our transiency because we must—it’s part of the American Way. Our colonial forefathers came from other lands to the Eastern shores, and then they proceeded “Westward Ho” to find their riches. So, place attachment doesn’t get much love.
It’s the part of our DNA that we try to ignore so that it doesn’t stop us from our big adventures.
According to the Census Bureau, people in the US move on average 11.7 times during their lives. That sounds like a lot to me! How can people feel rooted when they are “transplanted” so often?
It’s not just an American thing. Human beings are made to venture forth. This propensity is built into the well-known archetype made popular by Joseph Campbell in what he named the Hero’s Journey. The journey starts with a calling. The “hero” leaves their comfort zone and encounters challenges. These challenges present discomfort, trials, and even suffering. Throughout this suffering, the Hero grows, learns, and ultimately returns to their community, bringing a “boon” through a gift, insight, or power they’ve earned.
Examples of the Hero’s Journey abound in literature and film. The mascot for this Exit 9 mile marker is Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. Other examples are Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker, and Simba from The Lion King.
How this connects to your sense of place is this: We all set out in life with curiosity, ambition, and even compulsion to find our place in the world, without any certainty that we are headed in the right direction.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
—The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost
For much of our hero’s journey, we never truly know if we are on the path that makes all the difference. Even Frost admits, “I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages since,” implying that only advanced age will be the final arbiter as to the wisdom of the path chosen. But we have the opportunity now, as we make our life choices, to listen to our hearts and ask, “Do I belong here?”
No matter how far we roam for job, family, or wanderlust, the final step of the hero’s journey is to return home. It is up to you to determine where home is.
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My Exit 9 Sense of Place Story—2018: We find ourselves “back to where I once belonged” when we move to a cabin in Vermont
We moved to Central New Jersey from what I thought was to be our “forever home” in upstate New York. New Jersey was a far cry from the small town where we had spent almost 5 years. Our first home was on an acre of land on a dirt road without even a house number. There was a horse farm across the road that I would wander down to with a baby or two in the stroller.
The town itself was a blip on the map. Unless you were looking for a pint of milk, gas, or a grilled cheese sandwich at its only diner, you were headed out of town for your needs.
“Why would anyone move here?” My grandmother-in-law said that the first time she visited. But we loved it. We started our first home garden there. We were active with the local art and community center. The kids were able to roam freely.
Then Jim’s sales territory shifted south, so we did, too. The new town was different: it was in a development full of 1970s split levels and crowded with resources for young mothers. No more driving 14 miles to soccer practice after a full day at work! The cultural amenities were amazing. The schools were great; the elementary school was a short walk from our home through a park.
So, even though we planned on returning to a more rural life once Jim became untethered from his sales territory, we stayed in suburbia for 35 years, with no regrets.
Until one day, we found a tiny cabin on a lake in Vermont—the state where we had vacationed with the kids every year for 20 years. A casual drive up north one weekend turned into a love-at-first-sight encounter with a 680-square-foot home on Lake Champlain.
So, after a 35-year hiatus from our early rural life, we were back to the basics regarding amenities—back to gardening and the local arts scene. The lake, the maples, the mountains, the New England folksy friendliness, the evenings gathered around the fire pit with the neighbors, the sunsets, the volunteer work—everything tells us, “We are home at last.”
Sense of Place Profiles
In researching this chapter, I asked some people what “sense of place” means to them. Their responses fall into five general categories:
The Rooted
I have a very strong sense of place; I put down a tap root like an oak tree! While I could imagine myself perhaps living in another town, I could never imagine leaving New England. I don't find it easy to make friends other than on a superficial level, so as I get older, I feel like it makes more sense than ever to stay in the place where I've lived most of my life. I know people and places and resources, and now I belong to groups such as the pottery studio and the [garden club]. I get a lot of value from the beauty of my surroundings. I live in an area largely aligned with my values overall, and where there is a reasonable amount of tolerance for differences in lifestyles and opinions.
The Reluctant Nomad (who lived in 13 different cities all over the country before the age of 18)
One summer in my pre-teen or early teen years, my family was visiting Boston, as we did most summers, regardless of where we were living, in order to visit relatives. I can distinctly remember feeling like this was where I belonged. Steam billowing up from subway grates against the sunset; my dad handing a woman $20 to ‘catching the bus back home’; crowds of people from all walks of life grumbling past each other with classic New England affection combined with ice cold indifference; the same characters acting like they've known you their whole lives learning you share the same favorite pizza place, or commiserating over the woeful recent performance of whatever Red Sox player whose shirt I was wearing that day. It was a confusing, exciting, and bewildering energy to be surrounded by.
These felt like ‘my people,’ as quick to sucker-punch you for blocking the TV at the bar as they were to give you the shirt off their back when it was raining. They felt like ‘my streets’—a sprawling insane marsh of winding cobblestone cow paths from the 1700's butting up against glass-shelled skyscrapers, with no apparent rhyme or reason but still somehow finding a rhythm. I wanted to be a character in that play of intertwining worlds, and memories of it became my ‘North Star’— a coping mechanism for the next 6-8 years of continued uprooting and resettling and restarting everything from scratch.
[A sense of place] is extremely important to me. For me, it means a strong desire to not put my son through even a fractional amount of the uprooting I experienced in my childhood. It means a desire to be close to family, and having sense of security in knowing what to expect. The sense of place I feel from my nuclear family is something that transforms frustrations, challenges, hurdles or problems in life into a solvable, temporary inconvenience, and is a constant that keeps me grounded and my priorities focused.
The Practical
I have lived in or around Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, rural Central Wisconsin, Green Bay, and a small city on the shore of Lake Michigan. Now that work is no longer a constraint, we have settled in the small city. For one thing, the cost of living is much more reasonable, and crime isn’t much of an issue. Apart from a few medical needs, we can get to anything we need in ten to fifteen minutes. The people are, by and large, friendly, and you don’t see much of the desperate status anxiety that bedevils so many people in the big cities.
The Comfortable
We have been in Indiana for over 40 years. I tried North Carolina for three years. I liked the state of North Carolina, but the suburbs killed me. I had just been accepted into a new career program when my husband's company moved us back to Indiana. A totally car-based culture is, for me, intolerable. Even in Aransas, before we moved, I walked over a mile every workday and took the bus to get to work regardless of the weather. Indiana now is ‘comfortable.’ We live right downtown and know where to access services, how and when to attend events, how to avoid issues like traffic or dangerous areas. As I said, comfortable.
The Nostalgic
I was raised in Alaska. It will ALWAYS be where I consider home. The views, the weather changes, the simplicity all call me back. But my hubby says I remember it with rose-colored glasses. Even now, a picture brings back so many wonderful memories. We would probably still be there if the job issue did not happen.
The Legacy-Builder
[The city of my birth] is who I am. I cannot affect outcomes in the nation or Connecticut, but I have made a difference in my town. When I pass on, I'm going to have to show Someone my resume, and why I belong in a comfortable resting place. What I've done here, the people I've helped, the policies I helped develop, will be a big part of that resume.
The Topophiliac
The place where I felt most at home was our [Midwest] city neighborhood where we lived for 30+ years. It was the architecture, the gardens, and the social fabric that provided a full life. I was very career-driven, but by the time I had worked for 10 years, I knew it was either time to leave or I would be staying there the rest of my career. I chose to stay there not because the job was so great, but because everything about our life in our neighborhood was just right.
I need to be surrounded by handsome visuals that make me happy. But I also have a slight sense of adventure, so I’m not married to staying in one place all my life. [My partner and I] are very home-centered and like creating nests, but both of us are open to moving.
Decades ago, I spent some time in southern New Mexico. I found the desert absolutely depressing in its brown dryness. The mountains surrounding it didn’t make up for brownness. I loved the historic district of that town because the architecture was charming and interesting, and so many of those houses had green lawns. Well, as green as they could get around there.
When I went back to visit recently, I had exactly the same reaction to the surrounding desert and the historic part of town. There was such visual charm and elegance in the historic district but it was surrounded by depressing topography. If I could’ve lived in that part of town without ever going elsewhere, I would’ve been content, but that of course is not realistic.
I left mainly for a job opportunity, but I would’ve gone anyway eventually since I craved green surroundings. One of my friends said, ‘You didn’t love your boyfriend enough—that’s why you left,’ but I would never choose people over topography. I guess that makes me not a loving person? I don’t know, but I do know what I like.
How about you?
Now it’s time to write your Sense of Place story. I hope the profiles above gave you some ideas for approaching your own sense of place. Now it’s time for you to consider your own sense of place. Take a breath, take a break, get some inspiration from Simon and Garfunkel, and dive in!
Step one: Take your Sense of Place temperature
Suzy Welch is a professor at NYU School of Business and the author of Becoming You. She is also the creator of The Values Bridge, which defines and identifies your “Values DNA,” ranking 15 distinct values according to their dominance in your personal value system. Among those values is Place. For some, place may be a defining factor in a fulfilled life, but not as much for others. She says:
Place is a value that often goes unexamined, yet it can quietly drive nearly every major decision—where you build your career, whom you partner with, how you structure your life. For some, a deep connection to a specific city, region, climate, or environment isn't just a preference—it's essential to feeling at home, both literally and emotionally.
The Values Bridge can determine how strong a value Place is for you. It asks you to rate yourself, on a 1-7 scale, on how strongly you agree with the statement:
“When I envision my ideal life, I’d be living in the one place I know I’m meant to be.”1
If you are on the low end, it may not matter much to you where you live, as long as your basic needs are met, and this post probably isn’t resonating with you. If you are on the high end of the scale, proceed to Step 2, because you may benefit from further self-analysis to identify what is missing. I think it’s safe to say that if you got this far in reading this post, you are probably sensitive to where you live.
If you are happy where you are, congratulations! Recognize it and appreciate it!
Step 2: Fill out the Exit 9 Sense of Place Worksheet
Download the Exit 9 Sense of Place Worksheet, where you can explore your attitude towards place. It will help you diagnose how different early experiences have contributed to attachments you once had, and the ones you may seek to return to in the future.
One of the reasons the worksheets ask you to focus on childhood experiences is that, for most, as social psychologist Jerry M. Burger learned, it is there that most of us consider “home.” In his book Returning Home: Reconnecting with Our Childhoods, after interviewing over a hundred people, he learned that our map of our feelings about place start with our childhood homes. The yearning for “home” is evolutionary and universal. The complex connections in our brains create memories and help forge our identities, and thus keep us emotionally tethered to those early places, no matter how good or bad those experiences were. He says,
But why these years? Many of our participants had an answer to this question. Quite a few talked about developing a sense of self during this time of life…More than a third used the interview to reflect on how childhood experiences shaped who they had become and what they had done with their lives.”2
Because early connections with home can be the springboard for the rest of your life, mining them will provide context for understanding where you came from and help you figure out where you’re headed.
Step 3: Determine your next steps
If you do not feel at home where you are and want do something about it:
Make a plan based on what you learned in the Sense of Place worksheets.
The worksheets will have helped you pinpoint what is lacking in your environment. Is it family connection? Cultural belonging? Familiar landscape? Use the worksheets to identify those key elements that provide a sense of belonging.
And then use your new yardstick as you go in search of a home with a better fit.
If you are not happy where you are but you can’t be anywhere else right now, adapt.
Adaptation is key when you have a geographical mismatch. It will help you survive. To go back to the gardening metaphor, flowers are successfully transplanted all the time. So was my New Jersey friend, Jen.
The first Monday after we moved to New Jersey, I walked my young sons to school and waited outside with the other mothers—none of whom I knew yet—and waited for the doors to open.
One mother broke through the ranks and into the school with a foil-covered baking dish and an air of authority. I figured she must be PTA President—surely this was her territory.
I got to know Jen (not her real name) shortly after that. Turns out she was not a PTA president at all. She wasn’t even a well-established member of the Mom-brigade. Her family had just moved into the neighborhood a couple of months earlier—a move generated by her husband’s job relocation--just one of several over the previous decade.
I told her I was surprised and impressed with how she acted as if she owned the neighborhood.
“Well,” she explained, “We move so much I make it a practice to jump into my new place as fast as I can. It’s my way of adapting.”
“If you want to love your town, act like someone who loves their town would act.”
Melody Warnick, This is Where You Belong
Melody Warnick had such an experience in her own life, which she relates in her book This Is Where You Belong: Finding Home Wherever You Are. Warnick suggests doing what Jen did—diving right in. She provides a “Love Your City Checklist” with ideas on how to get involved. She says to look for pay attention to any emotional connection you can find: “Consider the things that break your heart, like the homeless guy on the bench." Those will be the emotional spark that ignites a shared human experience.
Other suggestions in her book include ideas for investing in the community by buying local, getting to know the neighbors, joining advocacy or political groups.
In short, she says that whatever you give to the community, the community will give back to you.
Every place has its good points. You may not connect with lackluster main street, but the public trails might be a place of peace for you. You might yearn to get out of your high rise and into your own home, but at least you can walk a couple of blocks and commune with the locals at the shops and cafes. You might not be the type to run for selectboard, but you can share a porch and a conversation with a neighbor.
Lean on the lovable things until you find yourself where you feel you truly belong.
It makes a huge difference, when you wake in the morning and come out of your house, whether you believe you’re walking into dead geographical location, which is used to get to a destination, or whether you’re emerging out into a landscape that is just as much if not more alive as you, but in a totally different form, and if you go towards it with an open heart and a real, watchful reverence, that you will be absolutely amazed at what it will reveal to you.
— John O’Donohue, The Inner Landscape of Beauty
Conclusion: The Moment I Knew Where I Belonged
Here’s where I land on my own place attachment after giving this whole thing a lot of thought. Most fundamentally, I was born in New England and I will most likely die in New England. I could probably visit the graves of 90% of my relatives going back hundreds of years at a handful of cemetaries across two New England states. That alone makes me feel rooted to this place. I know I will never permanently leave the Northeast.
City vs suburb vs country? Well, that has changed over time. In my youth, I was certain I wanted to live in New York City where I worked. I used to say that if you’re in New York City, and you’re bored, you have a serious problem. I loved the brash energy of those few square miles of Manhattan Island—not to mention the world-class cultural amenities and global diversity.
But what makes me happiest now is the opposite—the quiet solitude where nothing distracts me from the green farmland and the lavender and periwinkle silhouettes of the Adirondacks rising above Lake Champlain. The rural routes devoid of stoplights. The neighbors who have been stewards of the land for generations. The chance for a newcomer like me to extend a helping hand.
Way back in my 20s, Jim and I would vacation at a friend’s cabin in Southern Vermont. One year we went to a 4th of July parade in Wardsboro. Working in New York, we were attuned to epic parades! I mean, I had worked on the 1975 NBC production of the Macy’s Parade, and my mother-in-law worked for decades at Macy’s, so attending the World’s Most Watched Parade in person was an annual family tradition.
But Wardsboro is not Broadway. That day there probably weren’t more than a couple of hundred of parade-watchers, but they were enthusiastic! Red, white and blue waved everywhere. Youngsters were propped up on dad’s shoulders. Rows of dusty shoes lined the streets.
Then the parade started coming through. I can still recall the cheers and flag-waving for the town’s firetruck; for the Cadillac convertible sponsored by the local car dealer seating the prom queen; for the half-dozen pint-sized baton-twirlers. Yes, it all sounds cliché and Capra-esque, but we were enchanted. The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade couldn’t hold a candle to it.
And the grand finale float wasn’t a Santa Claus sleigh, nor a giant Mickey Mouse balloon anchored by bedazzled chorus girls. It was a pickup-drawn trailer where a smiling white-haired couple sat waving. Their credentials for this vaunted parade position? The hand-painted poster told us that they had just celebrated 50 years of marriage. The ovation from the crowd was the loudest for them.
So after they passed by, we started to leave, but we noticed that no one else was leaving, so we lingered. And sure enough, we heard the cheers start up again at the other end of the route—for the parade that had simply turned around for a replay. It was their way of stretching the happy event out.
We never forgot the feelings we had about the parade that day. That’s the parade we chased for the next 40 years—through New York and New Jersey. Vermont is the grand finale for us. This is where we belong.
One final profile to close this chapter
There is one more profile I wanted to illustrate. It is exemplified by the iconic spiritual leader Ram Dass, whose profile I call The “Place-Transcendent”: the rare ones whose sense of place is both everywhere and nowhere.
Here is a story told he told at one of his hundreds of Q&A sessions.
I remember being on tour for about 6 months. I was in a motel, and after that I was going to be going to my base camp, my apartment. And I sat down in a room that was either a Ramada Inn or a Motel 6--a plastic place with predictable qualities to it. I thought, only two more weeks and I can go home. And then I thought, isn’t that a bizarre concept—why aren’t I home now? Since I’m on the road all the time, I’m always not being home. So I got up and walked out of the room, closed the door, and walked down the corridor and came back and opened the door to my room and yelled, ‘I’m home!’ And that did something to my consciousness.
I realized that I’m at home in the Universe. If I’m not home now, when will be home? I must say, at that point I experienced that I am at home on Earth. I am at home in the Spirit.” Ram Dass, Here and Now Podcast, Episode 256.
And this will take us to the next chapter of Exit 9, Mile Marker 6 named: “The Homecoming of the Spirit.”
When we understand our place, when we understand it fully, from its geology to its biology, to the people that live in it, when we bring together the subjective and objective aspects of the place around us, we can live more fully. We are not severed from our context, but are able to communicate with more honesty and integrity. Carita Keim.
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Resources and Recommendations
The Need for Roots: Prelude Towards a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind by Simone Weil
Simone Weil was an author and philosopher, mystic, and activist, as well as a Catholic convert from Judaism. This book was written during World War II as a message to postwar France, and in it, she argues that modern society suffers from a spiritual uprooting. I will no doubt be continuing to draw on this book for my next chapter on spirituality. Weil calls for a renewal of connection—to place, community, tradition, and the divine—as essential to human dignity and the rebuilding of a just civilization.
Becoming You: Say Yes to Living the Life You Were Made For by Suzy Welch
I was almost done with this post when I happened to catch an interview with Welch on CNN in which she was talking about this book. As it turns out, place attachment is one of the 15 values that she defines and helps you measure in Becoming You. The book helps readers uncover their true purpose. It’s an easy read, and her website offers tools to help you find your “Values DNA.”
This Is Where You Belong: Finding Home Wherever You Are by Melody Warnick
Blending personal narrative with social science, Melody Warnick explores what it takes to fall in love with the place you live. She uses the lessons from her own moves to share practical ways to cultivate connection, belonging, and contentment. Her message is that home isn’t just where you’re from—it’s where you choose to belong.
Returning Home: Reconnecting With Our Childhoods by Jerry M. Burger. This book talks about the fundamental ways in which our childhood home has formed our entire complex suite of values. There is a reason that the univesal truth that almost everyone recognizes and relates to is “There’s no place like home.”
Carita Klein, YouTube: “Wendell Berry and a Sense of Place.” Posted by The Curator Poetry on YouTube.
I found this while googling “a sense of place,” and it’s a gem. Recorded at a conference in Holmes County, Ohio, it is a presentation of the connection of Nature, Spirituality and a Sense of place. The thesis: “Nature reveals God's character, making setting more than a backdrop. We are formed by the way we interact with land. When we form a sense of place, we communicate with more integrity, clarity, and wholeness.”
I also found inspiration in the writings of Wendell Berry (Home Economics, The Art of Loading Brush) and Wallace Stegner, A Sense of Place.
Taken from Becoming You: The Proven Method for Crafting Your Authentic Life and Career, Harper Collins, 2025.
Returning Home: Reconnecting with our Childhoods, Jerry M. Burger. Rowman & Littlefield, London, 2011.