A summer love affair with home
Photo by Abby Rurenko on Unsplash
It’s the season of travel, especially for college faculty. Summer breaks beckon us toward distant museums and libraries, preferably in cities with good hotels. Now is the time to tag on a week in Tuscany after a conference in Berlin, to chase a grant-funded question to a sun-drenched ruin. And where will I be? Mostly at home. No ancient ruins. Just an aging patio set and a view of my bird feeder.
Long before airline miles and Instagram posts, J.R.R. Tolkien gave us the definitive take on the transformative power of travel and its perils in The Hobbit. Hobbits, he wrote, have “little or no magic about them, except the ordinary everyday sort.” Above all, they love their gardens, their second breakfasts, and their cozy hobbit-holes. And yet poor Bilbo Baggins, the most respectable of his neighbors precisely because he “never had any adventures,” finds himself swept into a long journey, not by choice, but by the unwanted arrival of a wizard and his companions.
At heart, I am a hobbit. I delight in sitting on my back patio and greeting neighbors. I venture into the wider world (well, to be truthful, nowhere further than Middle Island, NY to the east and Dover, Delaware to the south) only when the equivalent of Gandalf bangs on my door. Given the choice, I’ll always elect to stay home. And based on social media memes, there are millions of others like me. Lately, I’ve started to wonder whether this impulse to remain at home—to love being at home--is something more than a neurotic personality quirk.
There have always been travel contrarians and arguments against taking out a second mortgage to book a child-free cruise along the Rhine. I only recently came across Agnes Callard’s 2023 “The Case Against Travel” (likely because I don’t read travel writing) and found it offers a compelling critique of modern travel, suggesting that it enlightens little and often leaves host communities reshaped by the needs of visitors. Callard, invoking heavyweights like Emerson and Chesterton, argues that tourism often masks aimlessness with purpose, offering the illusion of insight without substance. I found myself nodding along, especially at the image of the falcon hospital in Abu Dhabi, tailored more for selfies than for birds.
And yet, while I was delighted by Callard’s argument, my own reluctance to roam isn’t rooted in philosophical ambivalence or even climate consciousness, a valid and growing concern. Just ask the many ecologically vulnerable regions now imposing “green taxes” on tourists tramping through fragile ecosystems. No, my sympathies with Bilbo and his peers, both fictional and real, stem from the not-so-modest belief that civilization depends on those of us who are simply wired to remain behind.
Before I explicate what I mean by “wired,” let me address my opposition. Yes, I understand that traveling will broaden my mind. I fully concede that immersing oneself in another culture, say, by dining in a Moroccan riad or sipping espresso in a Roman piazza offers insights that no screen can replicate. I even commend writers like Arlie Hochschild who remain stateside, venturing into remote places such as Appalachian Kentucky to write well-researched pieces such as “My Journey Deep in the Heart of Trump Country.” Without such adventurers, we armchair travelers would be left to stew in our White Lotus- and Deliverance-fueled hallucinations of the world. We depend on these boundary crossers to report back.
In terms of travel aversion being wired, I think enough research has been conducted to suggest that some humans are innately inclined toward the quiet safety of the known. As a species, humans began as hunter-gatherers whose survival depended on their ability to move around. Our ancestors ventured out, mapping new routes and following the herds. But others, perhaps a bit more nervous, might have looked around and argued, “You know, this valley has water, some shade, and not too many predators. Maybe we pitch camp here for, say, a generation or ten.” These proto-agoraphobes, as we might now call them, reluctant to return to the chaos of the open plain, may have been the first to invent agriculture. And not out of ambition, but aversion. If we imagine agoraphobia not as a disorder but as an adaptive trait, one can see it as evolution’s gentle nudge toward civilization. After all, settling down was the first step toward writing, cities, and yes, eventually, travel brochures.
Yet if we are biologically inclined to settle, we are also spiritually urged to wander. The paradox runs deep. Biblical texts are threaded with the imagery of exile and the holy imperative to move. Abraham is called to leave Ur, the Israelites wander for forty years, and we are told, again and again, to see ourselves as “sojourners in a strange land.” Still, leaving home is not romanticized—it is almost always traumatic. Consider the grief of the Babylonian exile. Or the profound rupture of the Jewish diaspora following the Roman destruction of the Second Temple. These are not cheerful jaunts abroad but profound displacements, full of loss and a longing always to return home.
So which is it? Are we meant to root ourselves in place, like the first cautious horticulturalists, or to hold everything loosely, like exiles? Perhaps the truth is that we carry both instincts. Some of us lean into one more than the other, and that too may be by design, or evolution, or grace.
In my own life, I have wandered only 90 miles up the Hudson River, from the Bronx to a little town in Ulster County. Even that modest sojourn wasn’t exactly chosen; after high school, I was nudged, not unlike Bilbo, out the door by my parents, to college in distant Poughkeepsie. Then came marriage to an IBMer, graduate school, parenting, and eventually teaching at a nearby university. Without quite realizing it, I’ve rooted myself in the rhythms of small-town life. I joined a local Roman Catholic parish where people know each other’s names and grandchildren. Unlike friends who yearn for stints in Istanbul or semesters in Singapore, I have never envied passports thick with stamps. I have a library card and a weekly routine. I have quite literally settled.
“Settled.” It’s a word we’ve been trained to wince at, especially in contrast to its romantic antonym, “wanderlust.” The modern traveler is applauded for chasing experiences, while those of us who prefer the familiar are seen as lacking imagination. But what if staying home isn’t a consolation prize? What if it contains spiritual and intellectual rewards of its own?
In Western literature, beginning with Homer’s Odysseus, the hero is the one who leaves. But there are others to honor, the ones who stay, the Eumaueuses, Penelopes, and even Argoses. Monastics understood this. Staying put is not passive. It demands attention and patient intimacy with a specific place and usually very ordinary people. A traveler might know how to navigate airports in three languages; the stay-at-homer knows how to interpret the shifting moods of a passing neighbor by the way they mumble “Good morning.”
In The Hobbit, Tolkien suggests we must leave home on a grand adventure, at least once, to discover our purpose. He indeed casts the stay-at-home, “respectable” hobbits in a mildly negative light. But Bilbo returns home, of course. And it is back in The Shire, comfortable once again in his armchair, that he begins to understand what the journey meant as the years pass. Remember, much of humanity will not travel far from home.In fact, it turns out that staying close to home isn’t just a personality quirk or literary trope; it’s a measurable human behavior. A 2025 study from MIT’s Senseable City Lab found that people overwhelmingly revisit nearby places rather than venturing far. We may romanticize the journey, but most of us, it seems, are quietly loyal to the local. In the end, perhaps the greatest adventure is not in leaving but in staying, and paying close enough attention to discover the meaning woven into the everyday.
