5 August 2016
It was not an easy week, early August 2016, for tight-knit famille Brennan.
I say tight-knit, though it might not so seem. Us being of four countries and three continents.
We were gathered this time for the wedding of my sister Keara to a fine Englishman, Tom. And that meant a fine one hell of a ‘meeting of the clans’ party, too, a few nights before the wedding.
And then in the days after the wedding, for Mum and Dad it was time for a round of hard departures…imperfectly queued up one day after the next. A round that I think this time we all found particularly hard.
The week following was full of quiet smoke signals that this goodbye had provoked more pang than usual.
It all kicked off with the first good-bye, newly weds Tom and Keara setting off for Indonesia on honeymoon before settling back into their south Island, New Zealand lives.
And then the remaining four drove south to Dublin, where I took a flight to London for a few days on my way back to San Francisco. And brother Pete followed me a day later, a similar detour to see school friends before returning to Vancouver, Canada.
So we gave Mum and Dad this dripping tap of departures until they returned home to echoing hallways in their ’empty nest’.
Our family HQ today is County Donegal, in northwest Ireland.
Geographically, in the 1970s, we started off a Canadian family. An Irish-Canadian family. In the 1980s, we were an ex-pat Irish family in England. Except none of the Irish-Canadian kids ever lived in Ireland. And nor were they English.
Our home culture was distinctly Irish. And I would realize that anytime I was hanging out with an English mate. It was crystal clear that we were from different goldfish bowls.
My brother Pete and I had Irish passports, Canadian birth certificates and English accents.
So, “where are you from?” was never to be a one-word answer.
And nowadays, to start to explain that answer, the couple of sentences that I walk through have got even longer…with my somewhat-settled San Francisco base.
Today, our family outposts are scattered around the Pacific Rim. This is because independent and adventuring choices as adults have drawn us to spend time in…
- Africa — Mum and Dad lived in Botswana for five or six years during the 2000s.
- Canada — Pete…after a few years of international travel…found somewhere special to him in British Columbia, got hooked, stayed.
- New Zealand — Keara…after a few years of international travel, found somewhere special to her, got hooked, stayed.
- For me, France and Australia broke up early work-life London years before choosing to try San Francisco…happily ongoing.
And so today we are a collective of Pacific Rim outposts to a meaningful home base in County Donegal, Ireland.
Mum and Dad live a few miles from where they dated and married, which is a few miles down the road from Dad’s mum Nana. And Nana, on the edge of Donegal Town, is just a few miles down the road – west – of where our three grandparents that have left us are buried (same cemetery, separated by a path). And from where I partly spent my first Christmas. And – from where sister Keara started to surf in the hands of Uncle Paul and decided to celebrate getting married.
Keara started the family surf thing, there too…:)
So, while brother Pete, sister Keara and I are spread out all over the world with the uneasy aspirations of the three of us to live in magical parts of the world, Mum and Dad pursued their own dream to return to where it all started for them.
Goodbyes are not easy. There are no regular “pints” living like this, and Skype can be imperfect.
But neither is there much falling out (you just don’t have time for it!) and the time we do spend together gets a double-helping of appreciation.
The holidays are fantastic!
And, we’ve often heard comparisons with other families remarking that we’re as or more connected and in tune together than their clans, where everyone lives in the same country, or around the corner from each other.
And, in common across the three of us offspring that have fled is that each has chosen to truly chart his path, each in different places for different reasons. But it seems with the common thread of being fueled by a landscape and lifestyle really in tune with our spirits. The deluxe version of the same reason that any immigrants ever left where they first came from.
“Your poor parents”, we so often hear.
That jibes a little. But I acknowledge it too.
In part some guilt – that least useful of emotions – I’ll quip back with the defensive joke “they started it”.
But then get to the serious point beneath the joke: how lucky we are with the ultimately selfless parenting that “let go” and always encouraged, without leaning or imposing on us. And — er, it seems genuinely — they love the choices we have made to take our spirits to special parts of the world.
Back to that interesting question of “where are you from?”…
At a Good People dinner in San Francisco, I was a speaker giving a short talk about what “Where are you from?” means in an ever-globalizing world.
My talk explored questions around identity, choice, tribes and nationality (and how much the latter really matters, or not).
And that is a question that I often daydream into at the moment , I recently shared this with my boss on a Friday evening as we mulled a green card application.
It is a question provoked by today being less anchored to the distant past of where I am from. But excited and content with where I am now.
Being in early mid-life, with a few roots in the past, the teasing and intriguing – somewhat philosophical – question is the thought of “where will I be from in the future”? Where will I say I am from twenty or thirty years down the line?
I’m forty now.
Thirty-five years ago, I would say “I’m Canadian”, with a 5-year old boy’s Canadian accent. Ten years later it was a definitive and proud “I’m Irish”, but with a plummy English accent. Fifteen years later, I’d evolved to a pragmatic “I’m from London” as the quickest shortcut when I didn’t feel like wheeling out the full story. And it was because I loved London in that era, and identified with one of the world’s great multi-cultural metropolitan places to live.
Today wheeling out the full story is almost inevitable, because an accent is the first signal of “where you’re really from” and mine is immediately unusual and has people guessing and jumping to different conclusions.
And so, that proud Irishman-of-old in me smirked back in May this year when went to register to vote in the Brexit vote and learnt that there wasn’t any possibility that I am British. Her Majesty’s government online voter registration website rejected me having any entitlement to vote (not that I have ever said that I’m British…).
In the pre-dinner talk I gave that night for Raman Frey’s Good People group, I shared my perspective on the privileges and challenges of all these truths and questions and emotions. And I threw out the question of a post-nationality world. The question of how much a passport really meant, other than border bureaucracy.
And whether we are slowly on a course for a world beyond national identity, protection, and “us and them”.
I hope so, but I don’t think so. Only the dreamy liberal optimist in me can get there.
The basic psychology of tribe is too primal in us.
Think football hooligans, or the way an otherwise civil-minded surfer might behave to non-locals in the water (like an ape).
Think of the world wide web: increasingly central to how we connect and transact, and riddled with the best and worst of examples of tribe. From artisanal businesses and hobbies reaching wider audiences to rife, cowardly online forum racism (usually anonymous, because it’s easier that way…apes…).
And the internet is the medium that is so central to the cohort of “roamers”, who live across boundaries and whose values reflect that. Embracing and chasing difference with curiosity rather than the instinct to put up a gate and build a comfortable fort.
People think we are rootless and disconnected, but I have rich friendships that I nurture across Europe, North America and Australia in particular…as well as best friends in my family.
Some of the people that I feel most connected to, I am most in touch with digitally, and see the least.
It’s a healthy constraint.
With technology, the nature of connecting changes. Which is why I defend the Facebook “like” gesture. Facebook has created a click that is so small, yet has so much meaning. (Well, it does to me and that simple click loosely sustains relationships that are long distant, but that I value).
Technology changing the way we communicate is not new.
When the printing press came along, some people despised it too: the art of handed-down story-telling started to dwindle.
And so the journey to and from parental home in Ireland for Keara’s wedding was an apt time to finally read a just-published book that I ended up being interviewed for* four years ago.
I had met the Author, CM Patha, after sparking up conversation on the London Underground. CM went on to write Roaming: Living and Working Abroad in the 21st Century.
I can’t remember who started the conversation but it was quickly obvious that we were both Roamers. I was probably carrying three bags with LHR, SFO and DUB on different labels, and with two passports sat in my back pocket. And, CM was so clearly captivated by our tribe that she set out to write a research book on the demographic.
I learnt all kinds of things in this fantastic read (see my Amazon review), not least that there is a specific gene variant carried by around 20% of all humans — DRD4–7R — that “has been linked to curiosity, movement, and novelty”. CM Patha exposes this in Roaming (location 1296) and I had to click around after finishing the book to learn more. A 2013 National Geographic Article cited (the article is now removed but you can see references here and here):
there is a mutation…a variant of a gene called DRD4, which helps control dopamine, a chemical brain messenger important in learning and reward. Researchers have repeatedly tied the variant, known as DRD4–7R and carried by roughly 20 percent of all humans, to curiosity and restlessness. Dozens of human studies have found that 7R makes people more likely to take risks; explore new places, ideas, foods, relationships, drugs, or sexual opportunities; and generally embrace movement, change, and adventure. Studies in animals simulating 7R’s actions suggest it increases their taste for both movement and novelty. (Not incidentally, it is also closely associated with ADHD.)
But the most interesting case study for author CM Patha may be famille Brennan a decade or two down the line.
Catherine cites the French-Lebanese author Amin Maalouf in a few places, from his text “Origins: A Memoire”
“Trees are forced into resignation; they need their roots. Men do not. We breathe light and covet the heavens. When we sink into the ground, we decompose. The sap from our native soil does not flow upward from our feet to our heads; we use our feet only to walk…
…And we die, just as we were born, at the edge of a road not of our choosing”.
What will “settling” have meant? Where? For who? Like the word “career”, it is not a word I get too hung up.
On Tuesday morning, I headed down to the beach for a dawn surf and was filled with gratitude for choices I’ve made, the crazy family we are, and particularly the emotional stoicism of Mum and Dad as parents that brought us into the world to take-off too…
It will play out tightly somehow.
Post Script
My interview excerpt in CM Patha’s Roaming was interesting to read in print, four years on from Catherine interviewing me by Skype…
“Others approach this cycle of moving with a sense of adventure, even gusto. Kevin Brennan works as an environmental finance portfolio manager in San Francisco. Born in Canada to Irish parents, he grew up in the United Kingdom and describes himself as decisively “British-ish” [interesting, in an identity sense, I probably would no longer…]. Britain, however, is no longer on his travel itinerary. He says, “if San Francisco doesn’t work out, I reckon I will end up basing in Vancouver rather than back in London, realizing that overall lifestyle is more important than work alone, and accepting that I may have to start again there, and as an entrepreneur. Who knows, but I am becoming more comfortable with that by the day, and recognizing that as a positive quality rather than something to worry about!”. He stops to think and adds, “though the endless movement is sometimes challenging, you end up valuing freedom and agility more than continuity and playing it safe. Comfort and security aren’t as healthy for us as we think.” For Kevin, roaming may never end.
Post Post Script – links to more writing on Roaming
I never wanted to be an American – but I’ve begun to feel the urge – Emma Brockes, The Guardian, 1 September 2018
The problem with being a long-term expat – Kate Mayberry, BBC.com, 24 October 2016
