Sense of Place is a growing trend these days. Everyone, especially Millenials, seems to want to shop local, work local, play local, be local. But it is easier to say than do. We’ve moved to Nashville to help our own sense of place, hoping that being someplace a bit less transient than the Silicon Valley would enable us to put down deeper roots.

One of my influences in the Bay Area, Mark Scandrette, recently wrote a piece on his relationship with the Bay Area and the changes that it has wrought to his chosen home. We share many passions and purposes, and this quote could have easily been written by me:

I plan on living in the same house with the same woman for the rest of my life– though I frequently entertain fantasies of spending a year in Paris, working in an orphanage in El Salvador or living on beach in the Caribbean.

Yet he struggles with the lack of stability despite the roots of long-term house ownership in San Francisco.

I smirk when I hear people talk romantically about stability. I’ve lived in the same house with the same people for sixteen years, but everything around us, it seems, has changed or is about to. We’ve greeted and bid farewell to most of the neighbors on our block in a cycle that repeats itself every 2 to 3 years.

Even in Nashville, we see signs that neighborhoods are starting to change rapidly. Maybe the old adage “You can never go home” might turn into “You can never be home” as our modern lives become more mobile and transient.