0:00:00.000,0:00:02.000
Where do you come from?

0:00:02.000,0:00:04.000
It's such a simple question,

0:00:04.000,0:00:06.000
but these days, of course, simple questions

0:00:06.000,0:00:09.000
bring ever more complicated answers.

0:00:09.000,0:00:12.000
People are always asking me where I come from,

0:00:12.000,0:00:16.000
and they're expecting me to say India,

0:00:16.000,0:00:19.000
and they're absolutely right insofar as 100 percent

0:00:19.000,0:00:22.000
of my blood and ancestry does come from India.

0:00:22.000,0:00:26.000
Except, I've never lived one day of my life there.

0:00:26.000,0:00:29.000
I can't speak even one word

0:00:29.000,0:00:32.000
of its more than 22,000 dialects.

0:00:32.000,0:00:34.000
So I don't think I've really earned the right

0:00:34.000,0:00:36.000
to call myself an Indian.

0:00:36.000,0:00:38.000
And if "Where do you come from?"

0:00:38.000,0:00:41.000
means "Where were you born and raised and educated?"

0:00:41.000,0:00:43.000
then I'm entirely of that funny little country

0:00:43.000,0:00:45.000
known as England,

0:00:45.000,0:00:47.000
except I left England as soon as I completed

0:00:47.000,0:00:49.000
my undergraduate education,

0:00:49.000,0:00:51.000
and all the time I was growing up,

0:00:51.000,0:00:54.000
I was the only kid in all my classes

0:00:54.000,0:00:57.000
who didn't begin to look like the classic English heroes

0:00:57.000,0:00:59.000
represented in our textbooks.

0:00:59.000,0:01:01.000
And if "Where do you come from?"

0:01:01.000,0:01:02.000
means "Where do you pay your taxes?

0:01:02.000,0:01:05.000
Where do you see your doctor and your dentist?"

0:01:05.000,0:01:07.000
then I'm very much of the United States,

0:01:07.000,0:01:10.000
and I have been for 48 years now,

0:01:10.000,0:01:12.000
since I was a really small child.

0:01:12.000,0:01:14.000
Except, for many of those years,

0:01:14.000,0:01:16.000
I've had to carry around this funny little pink card

0:01:16.000,0:01:18.000
with green lines running through my face

0:01:18.000,0:01:21.000
identifying me as a permanent alien.

0:01:21.000,0:01:25.000
I do actually feel more alien the longer I live there.

0:01:25.000,0:01:27.000
(Laughter)

0:01:27.000,0:01:29.000
And if "Where do you come from?"

0:01:29.000,0:01:32.000
means "Which place goes deepest inside you

0:01:32.000,0:01:35.000
and where do you try to spend most of your time?"

0:01:35.000,0:01:36.000
then I'm Japanese,

0:01:36.000,0:01:38.000
because I've been living as much as I can

0:01:38.000,0:01:41.000
for the last 25 years in Japan.

0:01:41.000,0:01:45.000
Except, all of those years I've been there on a tourist visa,

0:01:45.000,0:01:47.000
and I'm fairly sure not many Japanese

0:01:47.000,0:01:50.000
would want to consider me one of them.

0:01:50.000,0:01:53.000
And I say all this just to stress

0:01:53.000,0:01:56.000
how very old-fashioned and straightforward

0:01:56.000,0:01:57.000
my background is,

0:01:57.000,0:02:01.000
because when I go to Hong Kong or Sydney or Vancouver,

0:02:01.000,0:02:02.000
most of the kids I meet

0:02:02.000,0:02:06.000
are much more international and multi-cultured than I am.

0:02:06.000,0:02:09.000
And they have one home associated with their parents,

0:02:09.000,0:02:12.000
but another associated with their partners,

0:02:12.000,0:02:16.000
a third connected maybe with the place where they happen to be,

0:02:16.000,0:02:18.000
a fourth connected with the place they dream of being,

0:02:18.000,0:02:21.000
and many more besides.

0:02:21.000,0:02:24.000
And their whole life will be spent taking pieces

0:02:24.000,0:02:28.000
of many different places and putting them together

0:02:28.000,0:02:30.000
into a stained glass whole.

0:02:30.000,0:02:33.000
Home for them is really a work in progress.

0:02:33.000,0:02:35.000
It's like a project on which they're constantly adding

0:02:35.000,0:02:39.000
upgrades and improvements and corrections.

0:02:39.000,0:02:40.000
And for more and more of us,

0:02:40.000,0:02:45.000
home has really less to do with a piece of soil

0:02:45.000,0:02:48.000
than, you could say, with a piece of soul.

0:02:48.000,0:02:50.000
If somebody suddenly asks me, "Where's your home?"

0:02:50.000,0:02:53.000
I think about my sweetheart or my closest friends

0:02:53.000,0:02:57.000
or the songs that travel with me wherever I happen to be.

0:02:57.000,0:02:59.000
And I'd always felt this way,

0:02:59.000,0:03:02.000
but it really came home to me, as it were,

0:03:02.000,0:03:05.000
some years ago when I was climbing up the stairs

0:03:05.000,0:03:07.000
in my parents' house in California,

0:03:07.000,0:03:10.000
and I looked through the living room windows

0:03:10.000,0:03:15.000
and I saw that we were encircled by 70-foot flames,

0:03:15.000,0:03:18.000
one of those wildfires that regularly tear through

0:03:18.000,0:03:22.000
the hills of California and many other such places.

0:03:22.000,0:03:25.000
And three hours later, that fire had reduced

0:03:25.000,0:03:27.000
my home and every last thing in it

0:03:27.000,0:03:30.000
except for me to ash.

0:03:30.000,0:03:33.000
And when I woke up the next morning,

0:03:33.000,0:03:35.000
I was sleeping on a friend's floor,

0:03:35.000,0:03:37.000
the only thing I had in the world was a toothbrush

0:03:37.000,0:03:40.000
I had just bought from an all-night supermarket.

0:03:40.000,0:03:42.000
Of course, if anybody asked me then,

0:03:42.000,0:03:43.000
"Where is your home?"

0:03:43.000,0:03:47.000
I literally couldn't point to any physical construction.

0:03:47.000,0:03:52.000
My home would have to be whatever I carried around inside me.

0:03:52.000,0:03:56.000
And in so many ways, I think this is a terrific liberation.

0:03:56.000,0:03:58.000
Because when my grandparents were born,

0:03:58.000,0:04:00.000
they pretty much had their sense of home,

0:04:00.000,0:04:04.000
their sense of community, even their sense of enmity,

0:04:04.000,0:04:06.000
assigned to them at birth,

0:04:06.000,0:04:09.000
and didn't have much chance of stepping outside of that.

0:04:09.000,0:04:13.000
And nowadays, at least some of us can choose our sense of home,

0:04:13.000,0:04:15.000
create our sense of community,

0:04:15.000,0:04:18.000
fashion our sense of self, and in so doing

0:04:18.000,0:04:20.000
maybe step a little beyond

0:04:20.000,0:04:22.000
some of the black and white divisions

0:04:22.000,0:04:24.000
of our grandparents' age.

0:04:24.000,0:04:26.000
No coincidence that the president

0:04:26.000,0:04:29.000
of the strongest nation on Earth is half-Kenyan,

0:04:29.000,0:04:30.000
partly raised in Indonesia,

0:04:30.000,0:04:34.000
has a Chinese-Canadian brother-in-law.

0:04:34.000,0:04:37.000
The number of people living in countries not their own

0:04:37.000,0:04:42.000
now comes to 220 million,

0:04:42.000,0:04:45.000
and that's an almost unimaginable number,

0:04:45.000,0:04:48.000
but it means that if you took the whole population of Canada

0:04:48.000,0:04:50.000
and the whole population of Australia

0:04:50.000,0:04:53.000
and then the whole population of Australia again

0:04:53.000,0:04:55.000
and the whole population of Canada again

0:04:55.000,0:04:57.000
and doubled that number,

0:04:57.000,0:04:59.000
you would still have fewer people than belong

0:04:59.000,0:05:01.000
to this great floating tribe.

0:05:01.000,0:05:03.000
And the number of us who live outside

0:05:03.000,0:05:07.000
the old nation-state categories is increasing so quickly,

0:05:07.000,0:05:11.000
by 64 million just in the last 12 years,

0:05:11.000,0:05:14.000
that soon there will be more of us than there are Americans.

0:05:14.000,0:05:19.000
Already, we represent the fifth-largest nation on Earth.

0:05:19.000,0:05:22.000
And in fact, in Canada's largest city, Toronto,

0:05:22.000,0:05:26.000
the average resident today is what used to be called

0:05:26.000,0:05:30.000
a foreigner, somebody born in a very different country.

0:05:30.000,0:05:34.000
And I've always felt that the beauty of being surrounded by the foreign

0:05:34.000,0:05:35.000
is that it slaps you awake.

0:05:35.000,0:05:38.000
You can't take anything for granted.

0:05:38.000,0:05:41.000
Travel, for me, is a little bit like being in love,

0:05:41.000,0:05:45.000
because suddenly all your senses are at the setting marked "on."

0:05:45.000,0:05:49.000
Suddenly you're alert to the secret patterns of the world.

0:05:49.000,0:05:53.000
The real voyage of discovery, as Marcel Proust famously said,

0:05:53.000,0:05:56.000
consists not in seeing new sights,

0:05:56.000,0:05:58.000
but in looking with new eyes.

0:05:58.000,0:06:00.000
And of course, once you have new eyes,

0:06:00.000,0:06:03.000
even the old sights, even your home

0:06:03.000,0:06:05.000
become something different.

0:06:05.000,0:06:08.000
Many of the people living in countries not their own

0:06:08.000,0:06:11.000
are refugees who never wanted to leave home

0:06:11.000,0:06:14.000
and ache to go back home.

0:06:14.000,0:06:16.000
But for the fortunate among us,

0:06:16.000,0:06:20.000
I think the age of movement brings exhilarating new possibilities.

0:06:20.000,0:06:21.000
Certainly when I'm traveling,

0:06:21.000,0:06:23.000
especially to the major cities of the world,

0:06:23.000,0:06:26.000
the typical person I meet today

0:06:26.000,0:06:30.000
will be, let's say, a half-Korean, half-German young woman

0:06:30.000,0:06:32.000
living in Paris.

0:06:32.000,0:06:35.000
And as soon as she meets a half-Thai,

0:06:35.000,0:06:38.000
half-Canadian young guy from Edinburgh,

0:06:38.000,0:06:41.000
she recognizes him as kin.

0:06:41.000,0:06:45.000
She realizes that she probably has much more in common with him

0:06:45.000,0:06:48.000
than with anybody entirely of Korea or entirely of Germany.

0:06:48.000,0:06:51.000
So they become friends. They fall in love.

0:06:51.000,0:06:53.000
They move to New York City.

0:06:53.000,0:06:56.000
(Laughter)

0:06:56.000,0:06:57.000
Or Edinburgh.

0:06:57.000,0:07:00.000
And the little girl who arises out of their union

0:07:00.000,0:07:02.000
will of course be not Korean or German

0:07:02.000,0:07:05.000
or French or Thai or Scotch or Canadian

0:07:05.000,0:07:07.000
or even American, but a wonderful

0:07:07.000,0:07:11.000
and constantly evolving mix of all those places.

0:07:11.000,0:07:14.000
And potentially, everything about the way

0:07:14.000,0:07:17.000
that young woman dreams about the world,

0:07:17.000,0:07:20.000
writes about the world, thinks about the world,

0:07:20.000,0:07:22.000
could be something different,

0:07:22.000,0:07:25.000
because it comes out of this almost unprecedented

0:07:25.000,0:07:27.000
blend of cultures.

0:07:27.000,0:07:30.000
Where you come from now is much less important

0:07:30.000,0:07:32.000
than where you're going.

0:07:32.000,0:07:34.000
More and more of us are rooted in the future

0:07:34.000,0:07:37.000
or the present tense as much as in the past.

0:07:37.000,0:07:40.000
And home, we know, is not just the place

0:07:40.000,0:07:42.000
where you happen to be born.

0:07:42.000,0:07:46.000
It's the place where you become yourself.

0:07:46.000,0:07:49.000
And yet,

0:07:49.000,0:07:52.000
there is one great problem with movement,

0:07:52.000,0:07:55.000
and that is that it's really hard to get your bearings

0:07:55.000,0:07:56.000
when you're in midair.

0:07:56.000,0:08:00.000
Some years ago, I noticed that I had accumulated

0:08:00.000,0:08:03.000
one million miles on United Airlines alone.

0:08:03.000,0:08:05.000
You all know that crazy system,

0:08:05.000,0:08:09.000
six days in hell, you get the seventh day free.

0:08:09.000,0:08:12.000
(Laughter)

0:08:12.000,0:08:15.000
And I began to think that really,

0:08:15.000,0:08:18.000
movement was only as good as the sense of stillness

0:08:18.000,0:08:22.000
that you could bring to it to put it into perspective.

0:08:22.000,0:08:25.000
And eight months after my house burned down,

0:08:25.000,0:08:27.000
I ran into a friend who taught at a local high school,

0:08:27.000,0:08:31.000
and he said, "I've got the perfect place for you."

0:08:31.000,0:08:33.000
"Really?" I said. I'm always a bit skeptical

0:08:33.000,0:08:34.000
when people say things like that.

0:08:34.000,0:08:36.000
"No, honestly," he went on,

0:08:36.000,0:08:38.000
"it's only three hours away by car,

0:08:38.000,0:08:39.000
and it's not very expensive,

0:08:39.000,0:08:43.000
and it's probably not like anywhere you've stayed before."

0:08:43.000,0:08:47.000
"Hmm." I was beginning to get slightly intrigued. "What is it?"

0:08:47.000,0:08:50.000
"Well —" Here my friend hemmed and hawed —

0:08:50.000,0:08:53.000
"Well, actually it's a Catholic hermitage."

0:08:53.000,0:08:55.000
This was the wrong answer.

0:08:55.000,0:08:58.000
I had spent 15 years in Anglican schools,

0:08:58.000,0:09:03.000
so I had had enough hymnals and crosses to last me a lifetime.

0:09:03.000,0:09:05.000
Several lifetimes, actually.

0:09:05.000,0:09:07.000
But my friend assured me that he wasn't Catholic,

0:09:07.000,0:09:09.000
nor were most of his students,

0:09:09.000,0:09:12.000
but he took his classes there every spring.

0:09:12.000,0:09:16.000
And as he had it, even the most restless, distractible,

0:09:16.000,0:09:20.000
testosterone-addled 15-year-old Californian boy

0:09:20.000,0:09:24.000
only had to spend three days in silence

0:09:24.000,0:09:28.000
and something in him cooled down and cleared out.

0:09:28.000,0:09:30.000
He found himself.

0:09:30.000,0:09:33.000
And I thought, "Anything that works for a 15-year-old boy

0:09:33.000,0:09:34.000
ought to work for me."

0:09:34.000,0:09:38.000
So I got in my car, and I drove three hours north

0:09:38.000,0:09:39.000
along the coast,

0:09:39.000,0:09:42.000
and the roads grew emptier and narrower,

0:09:42.000,0:09:45.000
and then I turned onto an even narrower path,

0:09:45.000,0:09:48.000
barely paved, that snaked for two miles

0:09:48.000,0:09:51.000
up to the top of a mountain.

0:09:51.000,0:09:54.000
And when I got out of my car,

0:09:54.000,0:09:56.000
the air was pulsing.

0:09:56.000,0:09:58.000
The whole place was absolutely silent,

0:09:58.000,0:10:01.000
but the silence wasn't an absence of noise.

0:10:01.000,0:10:05.000
It was really a presence of a kind of energy or quickening.

0:10:05.000,0:10:09.000
And at my feet was the great, still blue plate

0:10:09.000,0:10:11.000
of the Pacific Ocean.

0:10:11.000,0:10:16.000
All around me were 800 acres of wild dry brush.

0:10:16.000,0:10:18.000
And I went down into the room in which I was to be sleeping.

0:10:18.000,0:10:20.000
Small but eminently comfortable,

0:10:20.000,0:10:22.000
it had a bed and a rocking chair

0:10:22.000,0:10:26.000
and a long desk and even longer picture windows

0:10:26.000,0:10:30.000
looking out on a small, private, walled garden,

0:10:30.000,0:10:33.000
and then 1,200 feet of golden pampas grass

0:10:33.000,0:10:36.000
running down to the sea.

0:10:36.000,0:10:39.000
And I sat down, and I began to write,

0:10:39.000,0:10:41.000
and write, and write,

0:10:41.000,0:10:44.000
even though I'd gone there really to get away from my desk.

0:10:44.000,0:10:49.000
And by the time I got up, four hours had passed.

0:10:49.000,0:10:51.000
Night had fallen,

0:10:51.000,0:10:56.000
and I went out under this great overturned saltshaker of stars,

0:10:56.000,0:10:58.000
and I could see the tail lights of cars

0:10:58.000,0:11:02.000
disappearing around the headlands 12 miles to the south.

0:11:02.000,0:11:06.000
And it really seemed like my concerns of the previous day

0:11:06.000,0:11:08.000
vanishing.

0:11:08.000,0:11:10.000
And the next day, when I woke up

0:11:10.000,0:11:13.000
in the absence of telephones and TVs and laptops,

0:11:13.000,0:11:17.000
the days seemed to stretch for a thousand hours.

0:11:17.000,0:11:21.000
It was really all the freedom I know when I'm traveling,

0:11:21.000,0:11:26.000
but it also profoundly felt like coming home.

0:11:26.000,0:11:27.000
And I'm not a religious person,

0:11:27.000,0:11:29.000
so I didn't go to the services.

0:11:29.000,0:11:31.000
I didn't consult the monks for guidance.

0:11:31.000,0:11:34.000
I just took walks along the monastery road

0:11:34.000,0:11:36.000
and sent postcards to loved ones.

0:11:36.000,0:11:38.000
I looked at the clouds,

0:11:38.000,0:11:43.000
and I did what is hardest of all for me to do usually,

0:11:43.000,0:11:45.000
which is nothing at all.

0:11:45.000,0:11:47.000
And I started to go back to this place,

0:11:47.000,0:11:51.000
and I noticed that I was doing my most important work there

0:11:51.000,0:11:54.000
invisibly just by sitting still,

0:11:54.000,0:11:58.000
and certainly coming to my most critical decisions

0:11:58.000,0:12:00.000
the way I never could when I was racing

0:12:00.000,0:12:02.000
from the last email to the next appointment.

0:12:02.000,0:12:05.000
And I began to think that something in me

0:12:05.000,0:12:07.000
had really been crying out for stillness,

0:12:07.000,0:12:08.000
but of course I couldn't hear it

0:12:08.000,0:12:10.000
because I was running around so much.

0:12:10.000,0:12:13.000
I was like some crazy guy who puts on a blindfold

0:12:13.000,0:12:16.000
and then complains that he can't see a thing.

0:12:16.000,0:12:19.000
And I thought back to that wonderful phrase

0:12:19.000,0:12:21.000
I had learned as a boy from Seneca,

0:12:21.000,0:12:25.000
in which he says, "That man is poor

0:12:25.000,0:12:30.000
not who has little but who hankers after more."

0:12:30.000,0:12:32.000
And, of course, I'm not suggesting

0:12:32.000,0:12:34.000
that anybody here go into a monastery.

0:12:34.000,0:12:36.000
That's not the point.

0:12:36.000,0:12:39.000
But I do think it's only by stopping movement

0:12:39.000,0:12:42.000
that you can see where to go.

0:12:42.000,0:12:45.000
And it's only by stepping out of your life and the world

0:12:45.000,0:12:49.000
that you can see what you most deeply care about

0:12:49.000,0:12:51.000
and find a home.

0:12:51.000,0:12:53.000
And I've noticed so many people now

0:12:53.000,0:12:56.000
take conscious measures to sit quietly for 30 minutes

0:12:56.000,0:12:59.000
every morning just collecting themselves

0:12:59.000,0:13:02.000
in one corner of the room without their devices,

0:13:02.000,0:13:04.000
or go running every evening,

0:13:04.000,0:13:06.000
or leave their cell phones behind

0:13:06.000,0:13:09.000
when they go to have a long conversation with a friend.

0:13:09.000,0:13:13.000
Movement is a fantastic privilege,

0:13:13.000,0:13:16.000
and it allows us to do so much that our grandparents

0:13:16.000,0:13:18.000
could never have dreamed of doing.

0:13:18.000,0:13:20.000
But movement, ultimately,

0:13:20.000,0:13:25.000
only has a meaning if you have a home to go back to.

0:13:25.000,0:13:27.000
And home, in the end, is of course

0:13:27.000,0:13:30.000
not just the place where you sleep.

0:13:30.000,0:13:33.000
It's the place where you stand.

0:13:33.000,0:13:34.000
Thank you.

0:13:34.000,0:13:40.000
(Applause)