Brave Enough to Love People

I have been listening to A Snicker of Magic with my daughter — the audiobook version, our current ritual for quiet moments and long journeys — a children’s story with a slightly crooked title, about a town that may or may not still hold its magic, and a girl named Felicity who collects words the way other children collect shells or stones.

We were near the end, one of the last chapters, when a sentence arrived that made me reach for the pause button.

I played it again. Then once more.

Felicity — who has spent her whole life moving from place to place with a mother whose heart never quite settles — arrives at an understanding of home that has nothing to do with addresses.

Home, she realises, is not a house. Not a city. Not a place at all.

“Home is what happens when you are brave enough to love people.”

I had to put the book down for a moment.

Because this is the question I have been circling, in one form or another, through almost everything I have written this year.

What is home, when you do not have one in the conventional sense? When your children have been born in different countries than you and your address changes every few weeks and the only constant geography is the inside of your own family?

I have written about feeling most at home in myself. About the particular ache of places that don’t fit and the particular joy of places that do. About the threads of connection — a coffee shop that knows your order, a restaurant owner who remembers your face, a knife maker whose lineage stretches back centuries — that make a temporary place feel, briefly, like it belongs to you.

But Felicity’s definition cuts through all of that more simply than I have managed to.

Home is not the coffee shop. Home is not even Kyoto, much as I love it, much as I have been loving it loudly all month.

Home is the bravery of loving people. Specifically. Actively. Despite everything that makes it risky.

I think about what that bravery actually requires, because I don’t think it’s automatic, and I don’t think it’s easy, even — maybe especially — for those of us who consider ourselves naturally loving people.

It is brave to love people you will leave. This is the particular vulnerability of the nomadic life — the friendships formed quickly and deeply within the Traveling Village, knowing that geography will eventually pull people in different directions.

It would be safer not to love so completely, so fast. Safer to hold something back, to protect against the inevitable goodbye. We don’t. We love anyway, fully, knowing the leaving is coming. That is bravery, even when it doesn’t feel like a choice in the moment.

It is brave to love people who are struggling in ways you cannot fix. I have been sitting with this one particularly, this season — watching people I love face illness, face uncertainty, face the kind of difficulty that no amount of love can resolve. Loving someone through something you cannot fix requires a specific kind of courage: the willingness to stay present without the comfort of being useful. To simply be there. Which often feels like too little, and is, somehow, everything.

It is brave to love your own children fully while also building a life that asks something of them — moving them through countries, away from friends, into situations that are sometimes hard and unfamiliar. I think about this often. Whether the life we have chosen is, on balance, a gift or a cost to them, or — more honestly — both, simultaneously, the way most meaningful things are both.

And it is brave, perhaps most of all, to love yourself. To extend toward your own existence the same patient, unconditional care you would offer anyone else you loved.

I have written about this too — the long road toward learning that my own needs mattered, that giving myself a day or a practice or a boundary was not selfish but was, in fact, a form of home-building. If home is the bravery of loving people, then surely that includes the person you wake up as every morning.

Felicity’s mother, in the book, has a wandering heart — she cannot stay anywhere for long, cannot quite settle, is always pulled toward the next place by something she doesn’t fully understand. I recognised something of myself in her, reading it. Not the same restlessness exactly, but a kindred relationship with movement, with the question of where you belong when belonging isn’t tied to geography.

And yet Felicity finds home anyway — not despite her mother’s wandering, but within it. Home travels with them, in the love between them, in the small rituals and inside jokes and shared history that exist regardless of which town they’re currently passing through.

This is, I think, exactly what the Traveling Village has been for us. Not a place. A moving constellation of people who have chosen, again and again, to be brave enough to love each other — across countries, across the inevitable goodbyes, across the discomfort of communal living and shared bathrooms and too many opinions in one kitchen. We keep choosing it. We keep choosing each other. That choosing, repeated often enough, becomes its own kind of home.

My children are growing up the way Felicity did, in a sense — collecting places the way she collected words. Hoi An and Antigua and Barcelona, Seoul and Busan and Hualien and Kyoto… — each one a small treasure in a growing collection, each one teaching them something about how to arrive somewhere new and find what is good in it.

I hope, more than almost anything else, that what they are also collecting — quietly, without anyone naming it for them — is this understanding that home is not a location.

That it travels with you, in the people you carry and the people who carry you. That wherever they go in their lives, however far from this childhood of constant movement, they will know — in their bodies, the way you know things that were never explained but were simply lived — that home is something you build with your own bravery, your own willingness to love people fully even when it costs something.

That is the inheritance I want to give them. More than any house, any city, any place we might eventually settle into.

Today, that inheritance had a face.

We celebrated my oldest daughter here in Kyoto — surrounded by Traveling Village friends, most of whom we did not know a year ago. Not for any occasion. No birthday, no anniversary, no milestone marked on any calendar. Just an ordinary Sunday that we decided, together, was worth making extraordinary.

Because that is something else I have been learning, slowly, this year: the specialness of a day is not something that arrives on its own. It is something you choose. You decide a day matters, and then — through attention, through gathering the people you love, through the simple act of saying this day is worth marking — it becomes true.

The occasion does not make the celebration. The celebration makes the occasion.

This is the strange and beautiful mathematics of this life: people cross your path, you build something real together for weeks or months, and then you say goodbye — sometimes for a season, sometimes for good — and yet somehow you still have each other. The goodbyes are real. So is what remains.

Today, person after person wrote my daughter a note. Small messages, some just a few lines, telling her what she means to them — people we haven’t seen in months, people whose paths diverged from ours long ago and who took the time, today, on an entirely unremarkable Sunday, to reach back across that distance and say: I remember you. You mattered to me. I am still glad I know you.

I read those notes over her shoulder and felt something settle completely into place.

This is it. This is the thing Felicity was trying to tell me.

Home is not Kyoto, though I love it. Home is not even the Traveling Village, though I love that too. Home is what happened today — all those small, brave acts of love, written down on an ordinary day for no reason except that we decided it deserved one, handed to a girl by people scattered across a year and several countries, who chose, despite everything that makes it complicated, to keep loving her anyway.

Tonight, finishing the audiobook with my daughter, I will think about this. About all the people I have been brave enough to love this year — the friends made and left and somehow kept, the family members facing things I cannot fix, my husband across nineteen years of falling in and out and back into love, my children growing up in a hundred temporary bedrooms, myself, slowly, imperfectly, more bravely than I used to.

Home is what happens when you are brave enough to love people.

I think I have been building one all along.

I just didn’t always have the word for it.

Now, thanks to an audiobook, a girl who collects words, and an ordinary Sunday turned into something else entirely by people scattered across the world — I do.