“Where do you come from?” A question that appears simple, but in today’s interconnected world where people and cultures mix, it’s difficult to answer precisely. This is how British essayist Pico Iyer began his TED talk directed to the TEDGlobal conference audience on Jun. 13, 2013.
Using his multicultural background, Iyer presented to the public a variety of perspectives regarding the place we come from. Can it be the place of your origin, where you were born, or where you have been shaped academically? Perhaps the place where you pay your taxes? Or that one place you connect with the deepest?
“Home has really less to do with a piece of soil than, you could say, with a piece of soul,” he added. The meaning of home for Iyer became clear when some years ago his parent’s house in California burned down by wildfires. At that point all he could call home was what he had within himself.
Trying to find a precise definition for home challenges the phenomenon of multiculturalism. For generations we have been programmed to believe that there are black and white divisions of who and what people are. As Iyer continued, our ancestors have not had the chance to step out of this programmed way of thinking, but now we have better opportunities to see beyond these old structures.
As of today, 220 million people live away from their countries. This is a representation of our planet’s diversity. As Iyer put it, “This population is the fifth largest nation in the world.” And the numbers continue to grow.
“I’ve always felt that the beauty of being surrounded by the foreign is that it slaps you awake,” he said, underlining the power of new perspectives multiculturalism offers. He described the process of unlocking new secret patterns of the world like falling in love. “Suddenly all your senses are at the setting marked “on”.”
He continued his speech by bringing the public’s attention to a specific aspect of human nature. In a busy, culturally diverse world, we walk through life by focusing on a specific point in time, be that in the past, present or future. To Iyer, this is not an issue as long as we are focused on where we are going. “I began to think that really, movement was only as good as the sense of stillness that you could bring to it to put it into perspective,” he said, before explaining another aspect of what creates our home identity.
Eight months after his house burned down, one of his friends, a teacher in a local high school in California, suggested that he visit a Catholic hermitage. The idea of spending time in a monastery didn’t seem appealing to Iyer. However, his friend’s word that it helped even his most distressed students find themselves convinced him to go.
“The whole place was absolutely silent, but the silence wasn’t an absence of noise,” he said of the feeling he got when he first arrived at the monastery. “It was really a presence of a kind of energy or quickening.”
Iyer referred to that period as a transitory phase of his life. The stillness the monastery required was very much against his nature. However, lacking technology made him appreciate his peace more. And in that peace, he spent many hours writing, dedicating more time to his passion.
“I began to think that something in me had really been crying out for stillness, but of course I couldn’t hear it because I was running around so much.” The stillness allowed him to finally hear himself. “I was like some crazy guy who puts on a blindfold and then complains that he can’t see a thing.”
For Iyer, finding what home means was a long journey which required going through multiple periods of self-reflection and transition, and even the loss of his physical home. “Movement is a fantastic privilege, and it allows us to do so much that our grandparents could never have dreamed of doing,” he said. “But movement, ultimately, only has a meaning if you have a home to go back to. And home, in the end, is of course not just the place where you sleep. It’s the place where you stand.”