Accute Sense of Fernweh

I'll let this word speak for itself.

"These are my people," one student told me recently, pointing to her classmates. "I feel more at home with them than I do where I was born."

I hear that sentiment often; it comes with the realization that for all their transience and diversity, people who find their way there have much in common. I think of them as a peculiar tribe. A tribe for people unfit for tribalism. Their unwillingness or inability to settle — to embrace and be defined by one place only — draws them to each other. It makes them restless and curious. It helps them develop the sensitivity to multiple perspectives and the ability to work across cultures.

It also comes with a price. That price is struggling with the question of home and its troublesome acolytes: identity and belonging.

"The trouble with moving around and falling in love with new places," a colleague once shared, "is that you leave a piece of your heart in each of them." That resonated with my experience. In Italy, professionals working abroad are described as "runaway brains." My brain, however, never ran away. My heart just took it elsewhere.

















Gianpiero Petriglieri, "Moving Around Without Losing Your Roots" (October 2012)