It might be youth. It might be the reptilian impulses of a species with migration encoded in its DNA. It might be your inferiority complex or the boredom of small-town claustrophobia or the exhibitionist streak you’ve never told anyone about.

It might be the hungers of ancestors whose aspirations have sunk into your bones, pushing you to go. It might be loneliness. It might be your inexplicable attraction to “bad boys” or the still unknown thrill of transgression and the hope of feeling something. It might be the self- loathing that has always been so weirdly bound up with a spiritual yearning. It might be the search for a mother, or a father, or yourself. It might be greed or curiosity. It might be liberation or escape. It might be a million other reasons, but we all leave.

It’s like all we ever do is leave.

“Honey, all I know to do is go,” the Indigo Girls confess in “Leaving.” You can leave without a bus ticket, of course. You can depart in your heart and take an existential journey to anywhere but the “here” that’s stifling you. You can be sleeping in the same bed and be a million miles away from your partner. You can still be living in your childhood bedroom and have departed for a distant country. You can play the role of the “good son” with a heart that roams in a twilight beyond good and evil. You can even show up to church every week with a voracious appetite for idols.

Not all prodigals need a passport.

Why We Leave

We leave because we’re looking. For something. For someone. We leave because we long for something else, something more. We leave to look for some piece of us that’s missing. Or we hit the road to leave ourselves behind and refashion who we are. We hit the road in the hope of finding what we’re looking for—or at least sufficiently distracting ourselves from the hungers and haunting absences that propelled our departure in the first place.

And the road doesn’t disappoint: it offers an unending ribbon of sights and stop-offs whose flashing billboards promise exactly what you’re looking for—happiness, satisfaction, joy. Indeed, the road has a strange way of showing what looks like a destination in the distance that, when you get there, points to another destination beyond it. So just when you think friendship or wealth or a family or influence was your ultimate destination, you hang out there for a while and the place starts to dim.

What once held your fascination—even, for a time, seemed like it was your reason to live—doesn’t “do it” for you anymore. You won’t admit it to yourself for a long while. After all, you sent out all those celebratory announcements about your new existential home. You effectively told everyone you’d arrived; you believed it yourself. But at some point you’ll finally be honest with yourself about the disappointment, and eventually that disappointment becomes disdain, and you can’t wait to get away. Fortunately, just as you start to look around, you see the promise of a new destination down the road.

Read More