People want to find a place where they belong, a place that equally belongs to them. It feels wretched to be in exile, but few people grow up, live, and die in the same place. We wander, seeking a place to occupy in an exclusive relationship. We yearn for somewhere to settle down.
It’s not always an actual place that we want to settle, of course. When an area of land has been settled, it’s been defined as a domain, a physical territory in which specific rules are enforced, and over which certain people hold power. When a conflict has been settled, however, a conceptual territory has been created, a domain in which certain rules apply – rules that can’t easily be changed.
The word settled has the same root word as sit, seat, and saddle. Being settled is not about wandering around or rearranging the furniture. It’s about taking a seat, and inherent in the concept of a seat is the idea that it’s a place we can comfortably remain in for quite a while. A seat’s shape and our own human shape match each other, an arrangement that makes us want to stay put.
Social reality can be thought of as a system of inter-related settlements, of comfy chairs people know they’re supposed to sit in within certain contexts. When we’re unsettled, we feel as if that system is in danger of coming undone. We’re reminded that what’s been settled once and for all is actually always up for renegotiation. We may have supposed that we had claim over a territory, a place where we could sit, confident in the notion that our seat could never be taken by someone else. When we encounter a situation that unsettles us, however, we realize that everything we took for granted can be changed.
Perhaps things, we realize were never really as settled as we thought they were. It turns out that the furniture of our comfortable lives can be moved, kicked over, of smashed to pieces.
