“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

—T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), Nobel Prize-winning poet and one of the most influential literary figures of the twentieth century. His major works explore spiritual desolation, renewal, and the search for meaning.

Once upon a time, in a previous life long, long ago, I started a side hustle. It lasted several years and could have lasted longer. But here’s the thing. It did so well that I had to choose between it and my federal career. It was impossible to live in both worlds. I had to choose one or the other. I chose my federal career.

But linger with me for a second, and let me tell you about something I learned when Potomac Research Organization (PRO) was my hustle. Simply put, I did research, mainly using the Library of Congress and the National Archives. One area that brought lots of clients my way, sometimes high-paying ones, was finding people.

I had a solid track record for locating lost heirs, sometimes in cemetery plots. But that was okay: I still found them and took pride in knowing that my sleuthing had paid off even though previous efforts by others–often licensed private investigators–had failed. I attributed my success then–and even now, looking back–to something anecdotal perhaps, but it always proved true. Most people never go too far away from home. Most people stay near their roots, usually within 300 miles or so.

Over and over again, I’d say:

“Tell me where the person was born, and I’ll find the heirs.”

I always did.

Once, I found someone far closer: within a half mile of where my search began. My client was a DC businessman who was adopted at birth. He was looking for his mother. I do not need to bore you with all the details, nor would I even if I could remember them all. Jack–not his real name, but he has to have one–didn’t have a lot of information, but he had enough that I decided to take his case.

● Date of Birth: August 1943.
● Place of Birth: DC.
● Mother’s Maiden Name: Jones (fictitious, just like my client’s first name).
● Mother’s Place of Birth: Iowa.

I started by exploring published cemetery records across the entire state of Iowa. I lucked out. I found one with lots of people who had the same last name as Jack’s mother. Then, I consulted telephone directories and found a possible relative.

I passed the number along to Jack. When he called, he discovered that the woman who answered the phone was his aunt. She put him in touch with his mother, who was living in DC, less than a half mile from where Jack had lived his entire life. You don’t need the subsequent details, but you do need to know that the story had a happy ending. Jack and his mother reconnected, and the last I heard, they were still having clandestine monthly lunches. I always wondered whether Jack eventually found a place in the new life and new family that his mother had carved for herself after he was born. Realistically, I doubt it. Geographically, he and his mother were never more than half a mile apart. Spiritually, however, he had one leg in his familiar adoptive world and the other in his newly discovered birth world. I suppose, though, that Jack was at home, as much as he could ever be, as much as any of us can ever be.

Jack’s truth is true for all of us. The homing instinct is a strong one, and most people, in one way or another, end up going back home. Some people, though, return to their roots only to discover they’re no longer at the place they once knew as home. I’m thinking about people whose education (or social mobility) lifts them into a new world but leaves them hanging between two realities–their roots on one side and their new opportunities on the other. They don’t feel fully at home in either place.

In fact, there’s even a bit of academic writing about it, especially around first-generation college students, upward social mobility, and immigrant experiences.
Sociologists and memoirists alike talk about the tension:

● Feeling “too educated” or “different” when they go back home.

● Feeling “not polished enough” or “out of step” among the educated elite.

● Constantly negotiating a kind of invisible gap between the two.

Not too surprisingly, there’s a term for people like me: straddlers. I had never heard the term until a student in one of my Creative Writing classes did her book report on Alfred Lubrano’s Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams (2005). Lubrano shows how chasing the American Dream can leave you straddling two worlds—where you’re too educated to go back home, but you never feel quite refined enough for the boardroom. Through his own story and others, he reminds us that success doesn’t always come with a map or a welcome mat.

My student–an Ohio straddler–grew teary-eyed as she gave her report, leaving me teary-eyed, too–a West Virginia straddler, the first in my family to go to college. I could relate. Being a straddler is like living in a kind of cultural no-man’s-land—never entirely belonging again to the old world that spurred you on and never quite accepted by the new world where you landed. It’s a lonely, often bittersweet place.

Ironically, the straddlers I know–mostly community college professors like me–don’t talk about the dilemma that much unless we’re part of a panel or symposium exploring the challenges of first-generation college students. Even then, we focus on the power of education to transform.

In fact, it just occurred to me that until this post, I’ve never talked much about being a straddler either. Even now, it snuck up on me and took me by surprise.

But for writers, being somewhere between two worlds and not feeling really at home in either is perfect material.

One comes to mind immediately: American writer Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. She grew up as the daughter of a dry goods merchant/housewright and then became an overnight literary success equal in popularity to Mark Twain. Yet despite her literary status, while living in Randolph, Massachusetts–the boot factory town where she was born–she wrote to a friend:

“I have survived another Boston luncheon. I’m not literary enough for Boston, but I’m awfully afraid I’ve got to go to a dinner there.” (Kate Upson Clark, before August 1892, Letter 105, The Infant Sphinx: Collected Letters of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Edited with Biographical and Critical Introductions by Brent L. Kendrick, 1985)

Or what about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story, “Winter Dreams”? It’s a perfect case study of what it’s like being a straddler. Dexter Green earns the success he dreamed of, but the world he craves still sees him as an outsider. Some doors open, but never all the way.

Even the characters we celebrate—and the writers who created them—know what it means to stand on a shifting patch of ground. You might have a seat at the table, but you can still feel the worn wood of your own kitchen chair in your bones. You might build your fortune and earn your degrees, but somewhere deep down, you remember being the boy who was the caddy at the golf course.

Poets know that truth, too. Robert Frost hints at this quiet but universal dislocation in “The Star-Splitter.” In the poem, Brad McLaughlin grows weary of hugger-mugger farming, burns his house down, and takes the insurance proceeds to buy himself a telescope so that he can explore our place in the universe. Brad spends the rest of his life as a straddler, one leg on his rocky farm and the other somewhere out there between and betwixt the stars:

We’ve looked and looked, but after all where are we?
Do we know any better where we are,
And how it stands between the night tonight
And a man with a smoky lantern chimney?
How different from the way it ever stood?

We search, we climb, and we study the stars, but we never completely leave the farm fields where we took our first steps.

Maybe it comes down to nothing more than this. Being human means learning to live with one foot planted deep in the soil of home, and the other reaching, straining, yearning toward something larger—something luminous—just out of reach.

The tension that I’m writing about here and that we all experience whenever we stretch across two worlds—literal or metaphorical—is not a modern invention. It has ancient roots, reaching deep into the earliest reflections on what it means to be human. Across cultures and centuries, writers and thinkers have wrestled with the same essential dilemma that’s central to human existence—the inherent conflict between the flesh and the spirit. Are we ruled by appetite or guided by aspiration? Are we creatures of earth or beings reaching for the divine?

Even an ancient Egyptian text, The Dispute Between a Man and His Ba (c. 2000 BCE), captures the longing to escape the burdens of mortal life. A weary speaker pleads for release, saying:

“Death is to me today like the smell of myrrh.”

Centuries later, the Greek philosopher Plato echoed a similar weariness with bodily existence. In Phaedo (360 BCE), he writes:

“The body is a source of endless trouble to us … it fills us with loves, desires, fears, all sorts of fancies and a great deal of nonsense.”

This longing was not confined to Egyptian prayers or Greek philosophy. In early Christian thought, the tension was just as fierce. The Apostle Paul, in his Letter to the Galatians, draws the battle lines plainly:

“For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other.” (5:17-21)

Clearly, across time and tradition, the yearning to transcend the physical and grasp something eternal has been a defining part of the human story.

Maybe, at the end of the day, it comes down to nothing more than this. It’s not about the Apostle Paul or Plato or the Egyptians. It’s not about Brad or Dexter or Freeman. It’s not about my student or me. It’s not even about Jack.

Maybe, at the end of the day, it’s about all of us.

Maybe we’re all travelers looking for a place to call home, a place to land, sighing a sigh of relief as we say, “I made it.”

Maybe we’re all straddlers caught between two worlds, peering back over our shoulders even as we gaze toward the stars.