At 9:30am yesterday morning, my family of five got on a bus in Agadir. Destination: Marrakesh.

Our first month on this trip was a special one, and not only because it was the first month of a trip we’ve been dreaming about and planning for years.

It felt special because in a certain way, I rediscovered a home.

Leaving that home yesterday felt strange.

Twenty-two years ago, there was another morning (I was a fourteen year old) that I left Agadir with a different family of five (my parents and two siblings).

I wasn’t thinking about the future much at fourteen. I was probably preoccupied with the 8 hour drive we were on toward Rabat (the capital of Morocco) where we lived for the following three years.

Today, as an adult, I’m so much more aware of how impactful spending a majority of the most formative years of my life in Agadir really was.

This town was, and still kind of feels, like home.

Speaking to Moroccans in the local dialect, as shaky as I was using it so many years later, would inevitably result in gasps at how good my accent is…despite the shrunken vocabulary I’m wrestling to remember.

When I’d tell them I grew up here, they’d smile big and remark at how much I sounded like a Moroccan and would follow that with ‘inta maghribi!’, which means ‘you are a Moroccan!’.

Funny how much that shared experience binds us. I don’t feel that in England (though I’m a British citizen) and I don’t feel that in LA (though I was born there).

These days (and thanks to this trip) I can reflect on two places that feel like home:

• Gig Harbor, WA: a place I’ve lived since I was eighteen and love dearly. I’ve been there long enough to remember what it was like with 1 bridge, no traffic, and pre-Costco. I can get everywhere without a map. Much of Kirsten’s family (and now mine) live close by.
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• Agadir, Morocco: a place I lived for fourteen years and still feel so familiar with, despite its incredible growth. I can talk about Agadir like an ancient. I remember the first McDonalds, the estuary before the king’s new palace closed much of it off, the sand dunes near the beach that existed before the hotels flattened them.

The feeling of Agadir as home was rekindled on this trip. I didn’t feel it a month ago.

Spending time there felt so familiar.

In my head, I imagine coming back every year because I wouldn’t be a tourist, I’d be a local. My Arabic would come back in spades. It’d feel like I was just ‘visiting home’. I’m so glad it turned out this way.

There’s another thing I’ve experienced on this trip so far, and it also has something to do with the idea of ‘home’.

It’s that my family: Kirsten, Gideon, Greta, and Oz…they are also a home.

Wherever we are in the world, when we are together, it feels like I’m home in a sense. There is something magical about that. Family is so powerful.

I’ve been blessed with a great family story. Kirsten has as well. It’s far from perfect, but it’s really good, really strong, and really supportive.

As an aside, I don’t think I realize how difficult my life would feel without the family situation we have. I will never know the struggle and pain of people who’ve grown up with a weak, toxic, or missing family story.

I can only be thankful for what I’ve had. And I am very thankful.

And this family that I have, as I was mentioning, is a living, breathing home. A place of safety, comfort, beauty, honesty, tears, laughter and so much more.

I believe this idea of a non-physical ‘home’ can happen outside of family as well. There are non-family relationships that mirror that beauty, safety, love and comfort.

It’s possible to have a living and breathing ‘home’ with the people you know.

This topic has become a regular point of conversation for me and Kirsten.

How do we create more ‘home’? Who can we create ‘home’ with? Can we teach this to our kids? Can their relationships feel like this? Questions were both excited to keep exploring.

I hope these thoughts on home from a guy who rediscovered a physical one and is diving deeper into the psychological / emotional one encourages you to do two things:

• Consider visiting a physical ‘home’ if you’ve moved. If you can swing it, for more than a couple days. If I’m honest, I rarely gave Agadir a second thought over the past twenty-two years. What’s more, there was a lot that I struggled with here, so it’s not like the memories are all roses and butterflies. All the same, it’s been an incredible experience to reacquaint with my old stomping grounds and make them feel like a home again.
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• Consider investing more in the other home, the more lasting and important one, that many of us have: the people closest to us. Often that’ll be family and current friends. But maybe it’ll mean looking for new connections and relationships. And then ask yourself how you can make those relationships ‘home’. Could you move to Argentina with those people and still be home? Can you be at home with them on vacation in Arizona? Can you, in your current physical home (so Gig Harbor for me) create a better, deeper, stronger, more intimate home with your family and friends?

Until next time,

Sam