An email I received once from a Strong Towns reader has stuck in the back of my mind for years. It said (paraphrased), “I noticed in your byline that you live in Sarasota, Florida. I have to ask why you would choose Florida! It doesn’t seem to have many of the qualities of a strong town, what with all the suburban sprawl and the lack of walkability. What about it do you find embodies your ideals?”

I remember chuckling at the writer’s assumption that I had chosen to live in Florida because of the particular qualities of the urbanism or the place. I’m not denying that life works that way for some people, but in my case, I didn’t come to Sarasota for a lifestyle, but for personal reasons that had little to do with the place. I had met and begun dating, long-distance at first, my now-wife after visiting her roommate at Ringling College of Art and Design. (She, in turn, a Pennsylvanian by birth, wasn’t there because she’d fallen in love with Sarasota the city, but rather because Ringling offered an excellent computer animation program.) After she graduated, she was hired by a local startup and then by her alma mater; I stuck along for the ride.

I lived there for 12 years (10 accounting for a couple away at grad school), and if I’m being honest, always held the place at a sort of emotional remove. I didn’t try quite as hard to make or keep friends; I stayed on the sidelines of local politics. It was where we lived, but neither my wife nor I ever expected to be in Sarasota forever. We were both from other places and had lots of conversations about when we might move. I love Sarasota and got to know the city very well, but what those 12 years taught me is that you live differently in a place when you expect to be there indefinitely than when you believe you won’t.

I would plant a tree in the yard, measuring out paces from its trunk and thinking about the shade it would cast at different times of day and the view from various angles. And then I would feel the sudden, deflating moment of waning enthusiasm for the project when I remembered that it would be someone else’s shade, someone else’s view, by the time that tree was fully grown.

I still planted the tree after that. Most times. Not always.

A funny thing happened to me when we made the decision last year to move to my hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota. It wasn’t a spontaneous decision; we’d talked for years about a move to Minnesota to be closer to family and friends, and having children raised the stakes and the urgency. Once we narrowed in on a timeline—spring 2023—I started thinking about all the things I wanted to make a point of really enjoying in Sarasota before leaving. We’d spend a lot of time at the beach; we’d hit up favorite restaurants; we’d be really on top of our packing and planning so we’d have time to just be tourists in our tourist town at the nicest time of year.

If you read this space with any regularity, you know I have two toddlers, and if you know I have two toddlers and you know what preparing for a cross-country move is like, you’ve already laughed at my above expectation, because you know exactly how that went. February was the busiest month of my life. Many nights I collapsed on the couch with the lights on and fell asleep. There was no tourism.

But the other thing that happened in February was that it was the month of the incredible shrinking to-do list. Every plan I had that entailed a continuing life in Sarasota was instantly rendered pointless.

That text from a casual friend with a baby about my son’s age that said, “We should get them together sometime!” Nope. Guess that’s not happening.

Trying to catch up with the people I’d befriended on the city council and the planning staff: not a top priority anymore.

A short list of Strong Towns story ideas that involved on-the-ground research I wouldn’t have time to do? Crossed off.

Connect with the parents of a couple kids at my daughter’s day care whose names she had begun mentioning incessantly? Nope; why bother?

Plant that last royal poinciana tree that’s still in a big pot in the driveway? Hang all the birdhouses in our tree out front? Weed the flower beds and plant a new one and beautify the face my home presents to the neighborhood? Nope. Not going to be my problem now.

All the stuff I do habitually as a way of deepening my relationship with a place—take a different way home, bike through a neighborhood I’ve never explored, take the kids to a different playground—suddenly felt meaningless. Far from being exercises in preemptive nostalgia, as I thought they might, trips around town became simple errands to be completed with rote efficiency.

Weeks before the movers actually hauled our furniture out of the house, it—and Sarasota—had in some important emotional way already ceased to be home. It was just the place I was still sleeping at night.

What makes a place home? There are a lot of ways to answer this, but I think one is that home is where you make plans for the future.

There’s a parallel here to relationships. I remember a good friend of mine telling me once when we were both just out of college, ”After I’ve been on a couple dates with someone, I ask myself if I could see myself married to them someday. And if the answer is a clear no, I break it off immediately.” Early-twenties me thought this was crazy. What was the rush? What if you just…liked someone and were having fun with them? That’s what being young is for, right?

What she was saying was actually rooted in a pretty fundamental lesson about life. She had just gotten there early; it would be another decade before her words made sense to me. For my friend, if she wasn’t able to think about long-term plans with someone, then the relationship was hollow in the present moment, as well—no matter how much fun she might have in that person’s company. She wasn’t home.

One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever received about marriage is that, at a certain point, you are almost guaranteed to make yourself unhappy if you expect your relationship to check the right set of boxes for you. If it’s about finding the “right” person with all the right attributes, you will never be able to stop wondering if there was a better match out there, someone who would have made you happier. Every successful long-term relationship is rooted not in being “right” for someone, but in the hard, day-to-day work of getting better at loving the person you’re with, exactly as they are.

You, of course, don’t ever have to settle down with one partner for life. Many people don’t, and many are happier for that. Similarly, you don’t ever have to root yourself in a hometown, born or chosen. I know fascinating people who’ve spent their adult lives as nomads—maybe a few months in this city or country, a few years in this one.

I have come to think, though, the older I get, that basically everyone has to eventually root themselves in something. I think it’s pretty hard to be happy in this life if you don’t tether yourself to something—a family, a community, a faith, a place—that is inextricably part of you.

At Strong Towns, my job is to think about what makes a place antifragile: able to grow stronger and wealthier and more able to provide a good home and a good life for its inhabitants, year after year. I think strong communities need members with both tendencies. They need people who are well-traveled, who are restless explorers, who will bring in fresh ideas from the best of what the rest of the world has figured out. Somebody has to be the maniac shouting at suburban Canada about Dutch street design.

But strong places also need “mystic patriots,” the people G.K. Chesterton wrote about when he wrote, “It is the mystic patriot who reforms.” The person who will work tirelessly to improve the place they live, in ways that will reverberate for generations, is the person who loves it not as a consumer, not for some list of pleasurable attributes, but because it is their place. Because it is home.

I’m always going to be an explorer. I love visiting new cities, and when I do, I make a point of getting lost in them, exploring without a destination, trying to glean something of how locals experience the place. I don’t expect to ever stop doing this. But as I get older, I feel an ever stronger pull to be somewhere where I can plant a tree—literal or metaphorical—and be around to see that tree tower over me, someday.

I’m back in Minnesota now, in St. Paul, a place that has always felt like mine because I was born into it, and I don’t expect to move to another city again. But who knows. Life and relationships make these choices for you. I never expected to be a Floridian. In a slightly different world, I might have stayed in Sarasota for 50 years and sat one day in the shade of that poinciana. Or ended up somewhere else entirely, with a different set of commitments.

I don’t want to preach to anyone about how to approach the question of home. But I do see a trait in so many of the people who come into our orbit here at Strong Towns, who join as members or reach out to write to us: they’re people who are deeply committed to a place, beyond reason, beyond clear self-interest. I think that’s important to what we’re trying to accomplish.

We need people who will live in a place as though they’re going to be there forever, who will make plans and watch them grow. And to do that, you have to voluntarily give up on the idea that it has to be the right place or the best place. It just has to be your place.

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