WEBVTT

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Where do you come from?

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It's such a simple question,

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but these days, of course,
simple questions

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bring ever more complicated answers.

NOTE Paragraph

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People are always asking
me where I come from,

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and they're expecting me to say India,

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and they're absolutely right
insofar as 100 percent

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of my blood and ancestry
does come from India.

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Except, I've never lived
one day of my life there.

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I can't speak even one word

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of its more than 22,000 dialects.

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So I don't think I've really
earned the right

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to call myself an Indian.

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And if "Where do you come from?"

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means "Where were you born
and raised and educated?"

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then I'm entirely
of that funny little country

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known as England,

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except I left England
as soon as I completed

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my undergraduate education,

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and all the time I was growing up,

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I was the only kid in all my classes

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who didn't begin to look
like the classic English heroes

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represented in our textbooks.

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And if "Where do you come from?"

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means "Where do you pay your taxes?

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Where do you see your doctor
and your dentist?"

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then I'm very much of the United States,

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and I have been for 48 years now,

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since I was a really small child.

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Except, for many of those years,

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I've had to carry around this
funny little pink card

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with green lines running through my face

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identifying me as a permanent alien.

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I do actually feel more alien
the longer I live there.

NOTE Paragraph

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(Laughter)

NOTE Paragraph

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And if "Where do you come from?"

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means "Which place goes deepest inside you

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and where do you try
to spend most of your time?"

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then I'm Japanese,

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because I've been living as much as I can

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for the last 25 years in Japan.

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Except, all of those years
I've been there on a tourist visa,

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and I'm fairly sure not many Japanese

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would want to consider me one of them.

NOTE Paragraph

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And I say all this just to stress

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how very old-fashioned and straightforward

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my background is,

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because when I go to Hong
Kong or Sydney or Vancouver,

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most of the kids I meet

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are much more international
and multi-cultured than I am.

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And they have one home
associated with their parents,

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but another associated
with their partners,

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a third connected maybe with the place
where they happen to be,

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a fourth connected with the place
they dream of being,

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and many more besides.

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And their whole life will be
spent taking pieces

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of many different places
and putting them together

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into a stained glass whole.

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Home for them is really
a work in progress.

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It's like a project
on which they're constantly adding

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upgrades and improvements and corrections.

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And for more and more of us,

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home has really less to do
with a piece of soil

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than, you could say, with a piece of soul.

NOTE Paragraph

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If somebody suddenly asks
me, "Where's your home?"

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I think about my sweetheart
or my closest friends

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or the songs that travel with me
wherever I happen to be.

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And I'd always felt this way,

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but it really came home to me, as it were,

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some years ago when
I was climbing up the stairs

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in my parents' house in California,

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and I looked through the living
room windows

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and I saw that we were
encircled by 70-foot flames,

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one of those wildfires
that regularly tear through

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the hills of California
and many other such places.

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And three hours later,
that fire had reduced

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my home and every last thing in it

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except for me to ash.

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And when I woke up the next morning,

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I was sleeping on a friend's floor,

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the only thing I had
in the world was a toothbrush

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I had just bought
from an all-night supermarket.

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Of course, if anybody asked me then,

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"Where is your home?"

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I literally couldn't point
to any physical construction.

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My home would have to be whatever
I carried around inside me.

NOTE Paragraph

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And in so many ways, I think
this is a terrific liberation.

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Because when my grandparents were born,

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they pretty much had their sense of home,

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their sense of community,
even their sense of enmity,

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assigned to them at birth,

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and didn't have much chance
of stepping outside of that.

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And nowadays, at least some of us
can choose our sense of home,

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create our sense of community,

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fashion our sense of self, and in so doing

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maybe step a little beyond

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some of the black and white divisions

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of our grandparents' age.

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No coincidence that the president

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of the strongest nation
on Earth is half-Kenyan,

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partly raised in Indonesia,

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has a Chinese-Canadian brother-in-law.

NOTE Paragraph

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The number of people living
in countries not their own

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now comes to 220 million,

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and that's an almost unimaginable number,

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but it means that if you took
the whole population of Canada

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and the whole population of Australia

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and then the whole population
of Australia again

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and the whole population of Canada again

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and doubled that number,

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you would still have
fewer people than belong

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to this great floating tribe.

NOTE Paragraph

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And the number of us who live outside

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the old nation-state categories
is increasing so quickly,

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by 64 million just in the last 12 years,

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that soon there will be more
of us than there are Americans.

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Already, we represent
the fifth-largest nation on Earth.

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And in fact, in Canada's largest
city, Toronto,

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the average resident today
is what used to be called

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a foreigner, somebody born
in a very different country.

NOTE Paragraph

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And I've always felt that the beauty
of being surrounded by the foreign

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is that it slaps you awake.

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You can't take anything for granted.

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Travel, for me, is a little bit
like being in love,

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because suddenly all your senses
are at the setting marked "on."

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Suddenly you're alert to the secret
patterns of the world.

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The real voyage of discovery,
as Marcel Proust famously said,

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consists not in seeing new sights,

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but in looking with new eyes.

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And of course, once you have new eyes,

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even the old sights, even your home

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become something different.

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Many of the people living
in countries not their own

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are refugees who never
wanted to leave home

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and ache to go back home.

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But for the fortunate among us,

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I think the age of movement brings
exhilarating new possibilities.

NOTE Paragraph

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Certainly when I'm traveling,

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especially to the major
cities of the world,

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the typical person I meet today

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will be, let's say, a half-Korean,
half-German young woman

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living in Paris.

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And as soon as she meets a half-Thai,

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half-Canadian young guy from Edinburgh,

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she recognizes him as kin.

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She realizes that she probably
has much more in common with him

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than with anybody entirely
of Korea or entirely of Germany.

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So they become friends. They fall in love.

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They move to New York City.

NOTE Paragraph

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(Laughter)

NOTE Paragraph

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Or Edinburgh.

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And the little girl
who arises out of their union

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will of course be not Korean or German

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or French or Thai or Scotch or Canadian

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or even American, but a wonderful

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and constantly evolving
mix of all those places.

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And potentially, everything about the way

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that young woman dreams about the world,

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writes about the world,
thinks about the world,

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could be something different,

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because it comes out of this
almost unprecedented

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blend of cultures.

NOTE Paragraph

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Where you come from now
is much less important

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than where you're going.

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More and more of us
are rooted in the future

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or the present tense
as much as in the past.

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And home, we know, is not just the place

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where you happen to be born.

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It's the place where you become yourself.

NOTE Paragraph

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And yet,

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there is one great problem with movement,

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and that is that it's really
hard to get your bearings

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when you're in midair.

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Some years ago, I noticed
that I had accumulated

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one million miles
on United Airlines alone.

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You all know that crazy system,

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six days in hell, you get
the seventh day free.

NOTE Paragraph

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(Laughter)

NOTE Paragraph

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And I began to think that really,

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movement was only as good
as the sense of stillness

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that you could bring to it
to put it into perspective.

NOTE Paragraph

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And eight months
after my house burned down,

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I ran into a friend who taught
at a local high school,

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and he said, "I've got
the perfect place for you."

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"Really?" I said. I'm
always a bit skeptical

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when people say things like that.

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"No, honestly," he went on,

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"it's only three hours away by car,

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and it's not very expensive,

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and it's probably not like anywhere
you've stayed before."

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"Hmm." I was beginning to get
slightly intrigued. "What is it?"

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"Well —" Here my friend hemmed and hawed —

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"Well, actually
it's a Catholic hermitage."

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This was the wrong answer.

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I had spent 15 years in Anglican schools,

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so I had had enough hymnals
and crosses to last me a lifetime.

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Several lifetimes, actually.

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But my friend assured me
that he wasn't Catholic,

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nor were most of his students,

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but he took his classes
there every spring.

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And as he had it,
even the most restless, distractible,

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testosterone-addled
15-year-old Californian boy

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only had to spend three days in silence

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and something in him cooled
down and cleared out.

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He found himself.

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And I thought, "Anything
that works for a 15-year-old boy

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ought to work for me."

NOTE Paragraph

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So I got in my car,
and I drove three hours north

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along the coast,

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and the roads grew emptier and narrower,

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and then I turned
onto an even narrower path,

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barely paved, that snaked for two miles

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up to the top of a mountain.

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And when I got out of my car,

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the air was pulsing.

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The whole place was absolutely silent,

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but the silence wasn't
an absence of noise.

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It was really a presence of a kind
of energy or quickening.

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And at my feet was the great,
still blue plate

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of the Pacific Ocean.

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All around me were 800
acres of wild dry brush.

NOTE Paragraph

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And I went down to the room
in which I was to be sleeping.

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Small but eminently comfortable,

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it had a bed and a rocking chair

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and a long desk and even longer
picture windows

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looking out on a small,
private, walled garden,

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and then 1,200 feet of golden pampas grass

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running down to the sea.

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And I sat down, and I began to write,

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and write, and write,

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even though I'd gone there
really to get away from my desk.

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And by the time I got up,
four hours had passed.

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Night had fallen,

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and I went out under this great
overturned saltshaker of stars,

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and I could see the tail lights of cars

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disappearing around the headlands
12 miles to the south.

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And it really seemed
like my concerns of the previous day

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vanishing.

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And the next day, when I woke up

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in the absence of telephones
and TVs and laptops,

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the days seemed to stretch
for a thousand hours.

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It was really all the freedom
I know when I'm traveling,

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but it also profoundly
felt like coming home.

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And I'm not a religious person,

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so I didn't go to the services.

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I didn't consult the monks for guidance.

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I just took walks along the monastery road

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and sent postcards to loved ones.

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I looked at the clouds,

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and I did what is hardest
of all for me to do usually,

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which is nothing at all.

NOTE Paragraph

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And I started to go back to this place,

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and I noticed that I was doing
my most important work there

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invisibly just by sitting still,

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and certainly coming
to my most critical decisions

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the way I never could when I was racing

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from the last email
to the next appointment.

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And I began to think that something in me

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had really been crying out for stillness,

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but of course I couldn't hear it

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because I was running around so much.

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I was like some crazy guy
who puts on a blindfold

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and then complains
that he can't see a thing.

NOTE Paragraph

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And I thought back
to that wonderful phrase

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I had learned as a boy from Seneca,

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in which he says, "That man is poor

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not who has little but who hankers
after more."

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And, of course, I'm not suggesting

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that anybody here go into a monastery.

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That's not the point.

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But I do think
it's only by stopping movement

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that you can see where to go.

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And it's only by stepping
out of your life and the world

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that you can see what you
most deeply care about

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and find a home.

NOTE Paragraph

00:12:51.795 --> 00:12:53.814
And I've noticed so many people now

00:12:53.838 --> 00:12:56.902
take conscious measures
to sit quietly for 30 minutes

00:12:56.926 --> 00:12:59.435
every morning just collecting themselves

00:12:59.459 --> 00:13:01.995
in one corner of the room
without their devices,

00:13:02.019 --> 00:13:04.068
or go running every evening,

00:13:04.092 --> 00:13:06.024
or leave their cell phones behind

00:13:06.048 --> 00:13:09.941
when they go to have a long
conversation with a friend.

00:13:09.965 --> 00:13:13.110
Movement is a fantastic privilege,

00:13:13.134 --> 00:13:16.467
and it allows us to do so
much that our grandparents

00:13:16.491 --> 00:13:18.588
could never have dreamed of doing.

00:13:18.612 --> 00:13:20.493
But movement, ultimately,

00:13:20.517 --> 00:13:25.034
only has a meaning if you
have a home to go back to.

NOTE Paragraph

00:13:25.058 --> 00:13:27.825
And home, in the end, is of course

00:13:27.849 --> 00:13:30.693
not just the place where you sleep.

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It's the place where you stand.

NOTE Paragraph

00:13:33.356 --> 00:13:34.789
Thank you.

NOTE Paragraph

00:13:34.813 --> 00:13:40.506
(Applause)