In my last post I referred to a kind of continuum that may exist from home-space at one familiar end to homeless space at the other. The idea is that when a permanent change occurs in your living conditions, such as foreclosure, you may be thrust into homeless space, even if you are still living in a home afterward (someone else’s home).
On the near end of this continuum is a situation I hadn’t mentioned: the transient homelessness experienced by the traveler. I have done a fair amount of traveling in my career: enough to feel disconnection from my home-space, but not enough for my traveling space to become a home-space of its own. There is a certain homelessness to the traveler, especially when trips come back to back.
What’s interesting about this kind of homeless space, I think, is its distance economically and materially from what you’d normally associate with the word “homeless.” Instead of being played out in stressful or dramatic places—the street at night; underground; in rail-yards—it occurs in comfort and refinement—in hotels, in airport lounges, in conference rooms, in restaurants.
So, homeless space on the road is temporary, and mild in its effects. But over time it does shape, even disturb, one’s character.
I recall one particular trip that had all the feel of the traveling salesman’s midway journey. I was staying in a perfectly fine, perfectly shapeless business hotel halfway down the Peninsula in the Bay Area in California. There was nothing wrong with the room; there was nothing wrong with the food; there was nothing wrong with the bathroom. In fact, there was aggressively nothing wrong with anything. I seemed to be halfway between here and there, with “here” and “there” themselves being halfway points, never ending.
One’s sense of distance from oneself is heightened by such spaces. I felt somewhat lost by this disconnection to anything with an edge to it. While at the hotel, I presented on a Webinar, calling in from my room; and the strangeness of communicating with hundreds of people regarding a very focused, technical topic, while actually sitting alone in a stark, bland but comfortable place, depressed my mind and pushed me into premature exhaustion.
I think you are pulled by any travel out from your home-space and into a homeless environment, mitigated by your trappings, like your clothes, a book, your iPod, your cel phone. Habitual or regular travel extends this light homelessness through time … and since time is the enemy of homeless space, eventually it must pass and your travel-space becomes familiar space and therefore home-space. But if you do not reach that point you will be, like I was on the Peninsula, suspended, disconnected, waiting.
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