kylec | Slow Havamal: 35

In the 35th verse, we’re told to keep moving. If we try to remain guests for too long in a sinle place, our welcome will wear thin.

I’ve repeated this one to myself more times than almost all of the other verses I’ve encountered so far. Partly, it’s because I wore out my welcome by taking it to study right before holiday travels and discombobulations, and so instead of changing every week, I rutted up this particular driveway for the better part of three. That’s ok. I needed it.

Set aside the obvious literal value. I managed to leave my parents house well before I was encouraged. This is the time of the year when people traditionally reflect on the actions of the past, set some aside, and adopt new ones with enough fervor to get them into at least early February. The relationship between host and guest is asymmetrical. Or rather, it becomes so after a certain amount of time. When I first arrive at a stranger’s home, it’s a glowing refuge from cold travels. But if I’m a considerate guest, I know how to make it less of an imposition. A host shares a meal and a fire, and in turn he may get news, tall tales, and a friendly ear. In the best of circumstances, there’s a dance of gifts and camaraderie exchanged between the two.

The more I linger, though, the more it weighs on the host’s resources. I run out of stories, and the novelty wears off, but I still need food, a bed, and space in the house. Greetings become more habitual, and despite all efforts to remain polite, I begin to find myself underfoot too often. What marks a traveler? Is it one who never sleeps twice in the same place? One who sets a time to leave and maintains it? Neither is always practical, and it’s hard to draw the line between a guest and a resident. In the host-guest relationship, we might say that, like a door thrown open from a warm interior to a frosty morning, a traveler should move on before the exchange of high pressure cold air reaches an equilibrium in the home. Once that exchange is over, neither party benefits as much from the other.

Now let’s extend our guesthood beyond a warm cabin. I’ve written at length in past essays we can read the “host” as something like “a novel context which changes, and is changed by, us.” That change is agnostic. It can be pleasant or miserable for either party or both, and everything in between. Havamal suggests that even the best visitor should spare his generous host at some point.

The reason my* metaphorical guest travels is to seek the wisdom—change in the relationships by which he navigates the world—that new experiences bring. It’s certainly possible to reside in one place all your life. It may even be the best option in many cases. The new year provides us with an arbitrary opportunity to examine those places where we’ve been guests. Do I still contribute and receive from my work? My relationships? Are there attitudes and beliefs that I adopted last year that are due for a reforming now that circumstances have shifted? Maybe I’ve held them all my life, and only recently understood there are other viable options. What habits of mine are worn slick, spinning in the muddy drive of the life I’ve created for myself? Any of these things may have been wisely chosen to begin with, and beneficial throughout, but those as well as the tortuous ones run their course, if slower.

*I say “my” because the poem makes no pretension about these metaphors, and whether or not it intended them is unknowable, and unlikely. My view is a pragmatic one: that meanings change over time, especially between recipients, and I can benefit from something in a surprising way that the author never intended.

Where do we find these stale hostels? I could easily spend another month or more on this verse. There’s always something to learn, and wisdom to be gained, when we see a new world with new eyes, even if it’s the room we enter every morning. Quitting your job, divorcing your spouse, moving far away, and taking up a new faith are not what this verse suggests. Instead, we can look for those places where the exchange of energy, predicated like the laws of thermodynamics on a differential that causes a flow between two things, has gone inert. Where we no longer experience curiosity, eagerness, revelation, gratitude, mystery, promise, dumbfoundedness, sublimity, tantalizing fear—it’s there we’ve propped our feet too long.

The change need not be monumental. It starts with an examination of when we came upon this place, and why. What did we get out of it? How did this place, or these people, benefit from us in return? Then a departure with gratitude. It can be as simple as asking the person we live with a question that we never bothered to ask—would never have dared—then listening wholeheartedly for an answer. Or it may be a career change, after all. Of course, this puts us back out in the cold and the rain, seeking a new host, the nature of which we can’t anticipate. Where else would a wanderer choose to go?