The Geography of Starting Over

What We Unpack When We Move

There is a moment, somewhere between deciding to leave and actually leaving, when you look around at the accumulated evidence of your life and wonder what on earth you are going to do with all of it. Not the furniture, that problem solves itself eventually. The other things. The habits and the loyalties, the ten-year-old loyalty cards and the neighbours you keep meaning to invite for dinner, the particular quality of light on a January afternoon that you have somehow internalised as part of what home means. You cannot put these in a box. You cannot leave them behind either.

There is an old joke — Irish, in most tellings — where a lost tourist stops a local and asks for directions to Dublin. The local thinks for a moment, scratches his head, and says: “Well, if I were you, I wouldn’t start from here.” It is, on one level, completely useless advice. It is also, on another, the most honest thing anyone has ever said about reinvention. We would all prefer to start from somewhere less complicated. Less encumbered. Somewhere the past had been neatly filed away and the future stood open and uncontested. The problem is that there is only ever here. Here is the only place any journey actually begins.

I know this more precisely than I once did. A number of years ago, before I had any serious intention of relocating to Vermont, let alone France, a health scare forced a reckoning of the kind that has a way of clarifying things remarkably fast. I will not make too much of it. What I will say is that it showed me, with some urgency, that aspirations left unacted upon have a way of running out of runway. There is a phrase I have carried since the early years of my working life; feel the fear and do it anyway, and I can tell you now that for a long time I applied it to everything except the things that actually mattered. After that, I applied it differently. A romance that might have remained a pleasant memory became a leap of faith. A life that might have continued its familiar orbit tilted, decisively, toward something new. I came to Vermont not knowing whether it would work. It did not, in the end, work in the way I had imagined. But I stayed, and the staying taught me things the leap alone could never have.

The philosopher Alain de Botton has written, with some elegance and more wit, about what he calls the gap between the place we imagine and the place we arrive in. We pack, he suggests, an idealised version of our destination, the light, the pace, the version of ourselves we expect to become there, and then are faintly surprised to discover ourselves standing in it, still anxious, still distracted, still carrying everything we had hoped to leave at the departure gate. This is not a failure of imagination. It is simply the nature of the situation. We travel with ourselves. There is no other option. The suitcase can be emptied. The psyche cannot.

The philosopher Gaston Bachelard understood unpacking as something far more than a logistical exercise. Every house we inhabit, he argued, becomes what he called a shelter of the imagination. This structure, not just of rooms and walls but of the inner life we arrange within it. When we unpack in a new space, we are not merely emptying boxes. We are, in his terms, performing a kind of topoanalysis; a sorting of the self, from the rational upper floors down to the subconscious cellars. The new house becomes a vessel for everything we carry. What goes where says something about who we are choosing, in this new chapter, to be.

There is a particular kind of longing that attaches itself to the distant and the not-yet-arrived. Rebecca Solnit calls it the blue of distance. She noticed the way the horizon holds a colour that vanishes the moment you reach it. The mountains are only blue from far away. I have thought about this often, looking at France from Vermont. The imagined version of a life there is luminous with possibility in a way the lived version, inevitably, will not quite be. This is not a reason not to go. It is simply worth knowing in advance. The arrival will be different from the approach. It always is.

So how does a dismantled life become a home again? The writer Taiye Selasi offers a framework that I find more useful than most: what she calls the three Rs: Rituals, Relationships, Restrictions. A place becomes yours not through a passport or a postcode but through the slow accumulation of the ordinary. The particular baker who comes to recognise your face. The route you walk without thinking. The corner table, the market day, the neighbour whose name you finally learn. It is repetition, unglamorous and essential, that transforms unmarked space into somewhere that holds you. You do not belong to France on the day you arrive. You begin to belong the day you find yourself walking somewhere without checking the map.

This publication takes its name from a line in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: “The end is where we start from.” I return to it often. It captures something true about a life lived across disciplines and countries. The twenty years in financial services, twenty more in theatre, and now this, whatever this turns out to be. Every end, if you are paying attention, contains the seed of something that comes next. I am leaving Vermont in 2027, heading for France, carrying what I have learned here and setting down what I no longer need. I do not know, with any precision, what I am moving toward. I know why I am moving, and I know that here - complicated, encumbered, imperfect here - is the only place from which that journey can begin.

These essays arrive fortnightly. If any of this sounds like something you want to read, or something you are living through yourself, then I am glad you found your way here.

Steve Scrivens

Montpelier, Vermont