Roots and wings sounds like a contradiction, are you grounded and steady or can you soar? Is it possible to do both and if so how?
Where do you learn basic skills? Home.
Home is intimately tied up with your identity, home shapes the child and then the adult. It’s where you learn your fundamental values and core beliefs. You may either embrace or reject what you have learnt. Home helps you navigate the outer world, as home is a microcosm of society at large. Home is where you learn to share, cook, keep clean, look after yourself and your possessions, clean up after yourself, learn to be responsible and take care of others. With luck you will find unconditional love and learn how to trust others. It may not be your parental home, it will be somewhere where someone cared for and about you.
Socrates coined the phrase citizen of the world. Home can be anywhere, it could be inside yourself, built on what you learnt as a child. It’s where you go to revive and restore yourself; to then be able to take your place in the outer world. Your physical home will say a lot about who you are and how you act.
This is your root, your base, your inspiration, where you plan and dream, where you take care of yourself and others. The outer world is played out at home but writ small.
This root will give you the stability and strength to then go out and fly. Carrying the core beliefs and values you have learnt (or rejected) you leave the home and take you place in the wider world. It’s what we bring our children up to do, confidently leave the nest. Having a good secure home (hopefully) to take off from, then to come back to for restoration and maybe wound licking, ready to take off again. Eventually you carry home inside, a touchstone or talisman to reconnect and revive you in your quest for freedom.
The truth is we need both roots and wings, without the roots we may fly too close to the sun and melt our wings like Icarus. Without our wings we get stuck in the mud of drudgery and routine.
Life is an exquisite balance of the two.