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Where do you come from?
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It's such a simple question,
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but these days, of course, simple questions
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bring ever more complicated answers.
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People are always asking me where I come from,
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and they're expecting me to say India,
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and they're absolutely right insofar as 100 percent
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of my blood and ancestry does come from India.
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Except, I've never lived one day of my life there.
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I can't speak even one word
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of its more than 22,000 dialects.
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So I don't think I've really earned the right
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to call myself an Indian.
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And if "where do you come from"
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means "where were you born and raised and educated,"
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then I'm entirely of that funny little country
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known as England,
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except I left England as soon as I completed
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my undergraduate education,
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and all the time I was growing up,
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I was the only kid in all my classes
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who didn't begin to look like the classic English heroes
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represented in our textbooks.
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And if "where do you come from"
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means "where do you pay your taxes,
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where do you see your doctor and your dentist,"
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then I'm very much of the United States,
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and I have been for 48 years now,
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since I was a really small child.
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Except, for many of those years,
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I've had to carry around this funny little pink card
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with green lines running through my face
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identifying me as a permanent alien.
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I do actually feel more alien the longer I live there.
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(Laughter)
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And if "where do you come from"
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means "which place goes deepest inside you
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and where do you try to spend most of your time,"
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then I'm Japanese,
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because I've been living as much as I can
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for the last 25 years in Japan.
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Except, all of those years I've been there on a tourist visa,
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and I'm fairly sure not many Japanese
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would want to consider me one of them.
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And I say all this just to stress
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how very old-fashioned and straightforward
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my background is,
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because when I go to Hong Kong or Sydney or Vancouver,
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most of the kids I meet
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are much more international and multi-cultured than I am.
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And they have one home associated with their parents,
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but another associated with their partners,
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a third connected maybe with the place where they happen to be,
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a fourth connected with the place they dream of being,
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and many more besides.
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And their whole life will be spent taking pieces
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of many different places and putting them together
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into a stained glass whole.
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Home for them is really a work in progress.
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It's like a project on which they're constantly adding
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upgrades and improvements and corrections.
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And for more and more of us,
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home has really less to do with a piece of soil
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than, you could say, with a piece of soul.
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If somebody suddenly asks me, "Where's your home?"
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I think about my sweetheart or my closest friends
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or the songs that travel with me wherever I happen to be.
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And I'd always felt this way,
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but it really came home to me, as it were,
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some years ago when I was climbing up the stairs
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in my parents' house in California,
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and I looked through the living room windows
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and I saw that we were encircled by 70-foot flames,
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one of those wildfires that regularly tear through
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the hills of California and many other such places.
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And three hours later, that fire had reduced
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my home and every last thing in it
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except for me to ash.
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And when I woke up the next morning,
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I was sleeping on a friend's floor,
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the only thing I had in the world was a toothbrush
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I had just bought from an all-night supermarket.
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Of course, if anybody asked me then,
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"Where is your home?"
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I literally couldn't point to any physical construction.
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My home would have to be whatever I carried around inside me.
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And in so many ways, I think this is a terrific liberation.
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Because when my grandparents were born,
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they pretty much had their sense of home,
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their sense of community, even their sense of enmity,
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assigned to them at birth,
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and didn't have much chance of stepping outside of that.
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And nowadays, at least some of us can choose our sense of home,
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create our sense of community,
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fashion our sense of self, and in so doing
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maybe step a little beyond
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some of the black and white divisions
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of our grandparents' age.
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No coincidence that the president
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of the strongest nation on earth is half-Kenyan,
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partly raised in Indonesia,
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has a Chinese-Canadian brother-in-law.
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The number of people living in countries not their own
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now comes to 220 million,
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and that's an almost unimaginable number,
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but it means that if you took the whole population of Canada
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and the whole population of Australia
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and then the whole population of Australia again
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and the whole population of Canada again
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and doubled that number,
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you would still have fewer people than belong
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to this great floating tribe.
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And the number of us who live outside
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the old nation-state categories is increasing so quickly,
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by 64 million just in the last 12 years,
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that soon there will be more of us than there are Americans.
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Already, we represent the fifth-largest nation on earth.
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And in fact, in Canada's largest city, Toronto,
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the average resident today is what used to be called
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a foreigner, somebody born in a very different country.
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And I've always felt that the beauty of being surrounded by the foreign
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is that it slaps you awake.
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You can't take anything for granted.
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Travel, for me, is a little bit like being in love,
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because suddenly all your senses are at the setting marked "on."
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Suddenly you're alert to the secret patterns of the world.
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The real voyage of discovery, as Marcel Proust famously said,
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consists not in seeing new sights,
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but in looking with new eyes.
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And of course, once you have new eyes,
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even the old sights, even your home
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become something different.
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Many of the people living in countries not their own
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are refugees who never wanted to leave home
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and ache to go back home.
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But for the fortunate among us,
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I think the age of movement brings exhilarating new possibilities.
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Certainly when I'm traveling,
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especially to the major cities of the world,
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the typical person I meet today
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will be, let's say, a half-Korean, half-German young woman
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living in Paris.
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And as soon as she meets a half-Thai,
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half-Canadian young guy from Edinburgh,
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she recognizes him as kin.
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She realizes that she probably has much more in common with him
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than with anybody entirely of Korea or entirely of Germany.
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So they become friends. They fall in love.
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They move to New York City.
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(Laughter)
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Or Edinburgh.
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And the little girl who arises out of their union
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will of course be not Korean or German
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or French or Thai or Scotch or Canadian
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or even American, but a wonderful
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and constantly evolving mix of all those places.
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And potentially, everything about the way
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that young woman dreams about the world,
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writes about the world, thinks about the world,
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could be something different,
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because it comes out of this almost unprecedented
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blend of cultures.
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Where you come from now is much less important
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than where you're going.
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More and more of us are rooted in the future
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or the present tense as much as in the past.
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And home, we know, is not just the place
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where you happen to be born.
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It's the place where you become yourself.
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And yet,
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there is one great problem with movement,
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and that is that it's really hard to get your bearings
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when you're in midair.
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Some years ago, I noticed that I had accumulated
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one million miles on United Airlines alone.
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You all know that crazy system,
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six days in hell, you get the seventh day free.
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(Laughter)
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And I began to think that really,
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movement was only as good as the sense of stillness
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that you could bring to it to put it into perspectives.
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And eight months after my house burned down,
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I ran into a friend who taught at a local high school,
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and he said, "I've got the perfect place for you."
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"Really," I said, and I'm always a bit skeptical
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when people say things like that.
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"No, honestly," he went on,
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"it's only three hours away by car,
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and it's not very expensive,
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and it's probably not like anywhere you've stayed before."
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"Hmm." I was beginning to get slightly intrigued. "What is it?"
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"Well" — here my friend hemmed and hawed —
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"well actually it's a Catholic hermitage."
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This was the wrong answer.
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I had spent 15 years in Anglican schools,
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so I had had enough hymnals and crosses to last me a lifetime.
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Several lifetimes, actually.
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But my friend assured me that he wasn't Catholic,
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nor were most of his students,
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but he took his classes there every spring.
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And as he had it, even the most restless, distractible,
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testosterone-addled 15-year old Californian boy
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only had to spend three days in silence
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and something in him cooled down and cleared out.
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He found himself.
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And I thought, "Anything that works for a 15-year old boy
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ought to work for me."
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So I got in my car, and I drove three hours north
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along the coast,
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and the roads grew emptier and narrower,
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and then I turned on to an even narrower path,
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barely paved, that snaked for two miles
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up to the top of a mountain.
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And when I got out of my car,
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the air was pulsing.
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The whole place was absolutely silent,
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but the silence wasn't an absence of noise.
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It was really a presence of a kind of energy or quickening.
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And at my feet was the great, still blue plate
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of the Pacific Ocean.
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All around me were 800 acres of wild dry brush.
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And I went back down into the room in which I was to be sleeping.
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Small but eminently comfortable,
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it had a bed and a rocking chair
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and a long desk and even longer picture windows
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looking out on a small, private walled garden,
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and then 1,200 feet of golden pampas grass
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running down to the sea.
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And I sat down, and I began to write,
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and write, and write,
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even though I'd gone there really to get away from my desk.
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And by the time I got up, four hours had passed.
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Night had fallen,
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and I went out under this great overturned saltshaker of stars,
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and I could see the tail lights of cars
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disappearing around the headlands 12 miles to the south.
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And it really seemed like my concerns of the previous day
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vanishing.
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And the next day, when I woke up
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in the absence of telephones and TVs and laptops,
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the days seemed to stretch for a thousand hours.
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It was really all the freedom I know when I'm traveling,
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but it also profoundly felt like coming home.
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And I'm not a religious person,
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so I didn't go to the services.
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I didn't consult the monks for guidance.
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I just took walks along the monastery road
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and sent postcards to loved ones.
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I looked at the clouds,
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and I did what is hardest of all for me to do usually,
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which is nothing at all.
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And I started to go back to this place,
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and I noticed that I was doing my most important work there
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invisibly just by sitting still,
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and certainly coming to my most critical decisions
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the way I never could when I was racing
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from the last email to the next appointment.
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And I began to think that something in me
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had really been crying out for stillness,
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but of course I couldn't hear it
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because I was running around so much.
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I was like some crazy guy who puts on a blindfold
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and then complains that he can't see a thing.
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And I thought back to that wonderful phrase
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I had learned as a boy from Seneca,
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in which he says, "That man is poor
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not who has little but who hankers after more."
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And, of course, I'm not suggesting
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that anybody here go into a monastery.
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That's not the point.
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But I do think it's only by stopping movement
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that you can see where to go.
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And it's only by stepping out of your life and the world
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that you can see what you most deeply care about
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and find a home.
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And I've noticed so many people now
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take conscious measures to sit quietly for 30 minutes
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every morning just collecting themselves
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in one corner of the room without their devices,
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or go running every evening,
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or leave their cell phones behind
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when they go to have a long conversation with a friend.
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Movement is a fantastic privilege,
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and it allows us to do so much that our grandparents
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could never have dreamed of doing.
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But movement, ultimately,
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only has a meaning if you have a home to go back to.
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And home, in the end, is of course
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not just the place where you sleep.
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It's the place where you stand.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)