On Being Rooted to Place and People
How possible is it in 2026?
A few days ago, Sebastian asked me to write something on the challenge of rootedness in the contemporary world. Which is ironic, because Andrew Roos Bell had just left me a comment on Instagram where he criticized the way “people talk about rootedness and rootlessness.” I’m afraid I’m going to make Andrew, who is a faithful reader and commenter, frustrated by talking about rootedness and rootlessness. Sorry Andrew!
Here’s the challenge as I’ve seen it play out in many people’s lives:
You grow up in a specific place with your family and make friends, then you go off to college and make new friends and slowly grow a bit detached from that place and your old friends and even your family. Then you decide to find a job based on where you can find employment or where you and maybe your spouse think it would be exciting to live. Later, you have kids and discover that it’s hard to be distant from your family. You miss their support. They miss watching your kids grow up. But by that point you’ve already put down roots. The kids grow disconnected from grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins, but moving is a huge commitment and finding work (in this economy?) can be overwhelming. So instead, you make do. You try to travel to visit family when you can. You FaceTime with them. You make friends locally. But all along you have a sense that you are split. A part of you will always belong to where you grew up: the people and places you grew up with. And a part of you will belong to where you live now.
But is that okay? Do you have an obligation to move to be closer to family? If so, how do you know when you have that obligation? What demands do our belonging to people and place put on us, and how much should we follow our own vision of life? Should we just follow our dreams wherever they take us, or do we have a duty to consider our obligations to others?
