Following our nature vs. restraining it

The contradiction at the heart of my new life

“On a side note, I’m curious why you reject the term nomadic?”

It was

Nathaniel Drew

texting in response to a Substack I’d just posted. Since we connected last winter, he’d become an especially close reader of my work. And I’d become a particularly close watcher of his.

Nathaniel is renovating an old property in rural France (YouTube channel here), I’m renovating an old rural property in Catalunya, and we’re both Americans who have moved to Europe—so we had much to talk about.

Originally, Nathanial had wanted to know how I was dealing with some of the emotional, psychological challenges of the renovation. But after talking for two hours over video, we realized there was much more learn from each other.

We met in Barcelona a few months later, and today we continue to trade occasional long texts and voice notes. I’ve come to enormously respect Nathaniel’s capacity for deep thought, his curious mind, and his skill at cutting to the heart of important life questions.

So I wasn’t surprised that he’d written to question one of my core premises. “To me you are nomadic in nature and in spirit and I do not say that pejoratively,” he wrote. “You’re living multiple lives. You are learning to operate in a multitude of ways. You clearly care to think deeply about what you’re doing and the impact it has. I’m just curious why you think this pattern is now broken?”

It was provoking enough that it took me several days to respond.

I. Summer in the city

The guys who installed the minisplits for the aircon had been there all day.

Somewhat miraculously, I’d managed to get two separate bids in the midst of a heat wave—each had promised to get the work done within a week (The expat Facebook groups had recommended a big box store for the work—but Leroy Merlin couldn’t even get there to give me a quote for another three weeks).

The guys arrived just after 9 a.m. and promptly filled the apartment with boxes the size of small refrigerators. Four units: one for each bedroom and one for the large kitchen and living space, plus two outside condensors. I passed the morning to the sound of huge drill bits clawing through the concrete and brick walls. Men walking in and out from the street with more materials and equipment. Ladders reaching up to the high cielings to prepare the walls for conduit.

The guys were from Bolivia. The other bid had been from two Colombian brothers. Spain is in the midst of a massive immigration boom and is currently the best performing economy in Europe. The two facts are not un-related, I thought. Without people to do work like this, the economy would ground to a halt, not least because it’s not possible to think straight in this weather—the heat rots your brain.

My girlfriend had also been working from the apartment. The aircon in her office building by the sea was down for maintenance and they’d recommended everyone stay home. Office buildings aren’t typically designed for self-cooling during a heatwave.

On the other hand, my apartment was on the ground floor, with air flow from the street on one end, the back terrace on the other, and a small courtyard in the center. With strategic opening of windows, it was possible to send moving air almost anywhere, and two floor fans compensated for everything else.

Still, it’d been hard to sleep, harder to work. The minisplits would bring a special kind of relief. I wanted to get them installed before we left for Cantabria for a month—my step-father would be visiting directly after that trip, and I wanted him to be comfortable.

II. My son arrives

Two weeks later, I was nervously awaiting word from my son that he’d made his flight. He was doing his first airport connection by himself, an international: Karpathos to Athens, Athens to Barcelona.

His phone had gone dark—the lack of a second check mark robbing me of my parental ability to make sure everything was alright. He could have mistakenly parked himself at the wrong gate. The airline could have changed gates last-minute. He could be so focused on whatever FIFA game was on his iPad that he wouldn’t notice until it was too late.

Finally, I got a message: he’d put the phone on battery saver because it was about to die. He was on the plane. They were taxiing toward the runway.

Later, he would give me shit for sending three worried texts in a row and calling twice.

I don’t know, maybe I’m still in mourning for the end of his childhood. It happened definitively about a year ago, when he was living with me in Barcelona, attending an international school and going to as many FC Barcelona games as he could. I watched it happen before my eyes: in the span of about six weeks, he went from kid to teenager. I still haven’t quite reconciled with the change.

When I saw him come out from the baggage area at the airport, I could see he’d grown. We stood back to back. My girlfriend eyed the miniscule difference in height. I still had him, but my days were numbered.

Back at the apartment, we enlisted him in helping to retrieve more furniture from Wallapop, shuttling pieces of tables and chairs up and down the elevator from a top story apartment building in Eixample. He sat on the street corner in one of the lounge chairs guarding a few more pieces while my girlfriend rushed back and we unloaded a van’s worth of furniture into the apartment.

It was 8 p.m. before we were done. Showered, dressed, we went for a burger in Blai and then walked to the movie theater in our old neighborhood, Sant Antoni, to see the new Jurrasic Park movie.

III. Cantabria

It was a frenzied five weeks at the new apartment.

But with the aircon installed, the kitchen done, the two bedrooms, the office, even the large u-shaped Soderhamn sofa for the TV area arrived and built, it was time for a road trip.

The Cantabria vacation with my family had been planned months ago. Even before I’d begun searching for a Barcelona apartment. In fact, aside from the hard core nesting I’d been doing, the past few months had felt pretty nomadic.

I’d been to New Mexico for my father’s retirement party, and for the first time in many years all three siblings were together in the same space. My brother from San Diego, my sister now living in Santa Fe, blessedly returned from several years in New Zealand.

As I showed my girlfriend the place of my birth, land of enchantment, the high desert and mountains, the climbing crags and the restaurants, she asked me if I could ever see myself back living here.

I hesitated—in my mind, I’m committed to Spain and to Barcelona; I just bought an apartment!—but at the end I had to admit that Santa Fe would be a wonderful place to end up in life. There could be no complaints if my future somehow led me back there.

But now it was time to drive the seven hours from Barcelona, past Zaragoza, up through the Basque Country, past Bilbao and into Cantabria, toward Asturias and the Picos de Europa.

A few days later, we would take a drive through the Picos—some of the most stunning landscape I’ve seen anywhere, ever. Enough soaring cliffs on each side that it makes even Catalunya’s absurdly rich bounty of climbing crags pale in comparison.

If only there was a place to park, which most often there was not. Cantabria and Asturias are popular Summer vacation spots with the rest of Spain, plus not a few French and Germans. Even the smallest villages are full, as are many beaches. While others from across the oceans go to Barcelona for August, those living in Barcelona go north, here.

But there was one place we found, pristine, seemingly untouched, down a small dirt road next to a forested hillside—one of the most beautiful beaches I’d seen anywhere, with one of the most beatiful climbing crags, clinging to the coastline, waves dashing against slanted caves as the tide goes in and out. A beautiful, untouched inlet, from which a lazy river flows out to the sea, where small fishing boats trawl a line for the Atlantic fish that come in to feed.

IV. My nomadic spirit

So it was that among the coves and beaches, the coastline, and the climbing cliffs, that I took a moment to return Nathaniel’s long text about my nomadic spirit.

I told him that I always grapple with how to balance “knowing myself” against making intentional choices about where to take my life. That to surrender to my “nature” would only lead me down paths I was likely to regret looking back at the end of my life. That to forge meaningful relationships almost always means staying in place. To say nothing of my longer-term desires, such as renovating the house, that simply require a fixed location. “A lot of the things I really want to DO WELL require me to be in place,” I wrote.

This is true even in climbing—to progress in the sport is to come back to the same hard projects over and over. To root yourself at a crag, to come to know intimately every hold, every pocket, every small edge of the rock. There are certain climbs whose every movement is lodged in my brain forever, just as a song lyric might be. That only came from staying in place.

I concluded:

So all of this is to say… my spirit and nature might be nomadic, but… I just can’t get past the deliberate thinking through of what I want for my life, and all of that means I should probably restrain my nomadic spirit to some extent. The question is… to what extent?

Of course, we all need to account for changes in life. Growth, development, evolution in desires. We don’t have to stay in place forever. But by committing to a place (often through buying property), it introduces deliberate friction to what might otherwise be an easy decision to pick up and go, in search of more novelty.

I may have a nomadic spirit, it’s true. I think Nathaniel was right about that.

But it’s also true that I’ve become somewhat negative about “nomadism”—I do speak of it in the pejorative—because I’ve come to look down on what digital nomadism in particular represents. I don’t like the shallowness of the relationships. The lack of home or connection to place. The continual using of a community while the people who actually live there are what makes the fancy-free, rootless lifestyle possible.

Or maybe I’m just reacting to my own deep-down, unresolved issues. A rejection of self (an all too familiar story).

Some months ago someone who identified himself as a farmer commented on one of my posts. He is literally rooted in place, but he also understood that humanity has a long history of nomadism:

Historically, there were always people like the gypsies and travelling circuses that roamed across the world, but the key thing was they were a tribe that moved together, and in many ways they were (and still are) physically mobile but socially sedentary. They were also always selling things that weren't easily obtainable in sedentary places, so were welcomed and valued.

The problems with nomadism aren’t inherent; it’s just the modern iteration that I’m soured on. With great freedom comes great responsibility and all that, except that modern digital nomads do little to embrace responsibility. They privilege freedom above all else, as I once did.

Though I’ve settled somewhat, there’s a tension that hasn’t dissipated.

Our nature is there; to what extent should we follow it?

So have asked thoughtful people for all time

View from a climbing crag in Cantabria

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