One of the fundamental instincts for scientists is to categorize and to define. It makes things easier to put in boxes, and therefore easier to understand. We find similarities in color, shape, size, sex, behavior, origin, sexual orientation, belief and pretty much anything else we can use to arbitrarily define people, and it makes the world a lot simpler for us. This is what makes it so important to have an identity, because defining yourself is the way that you judge everybody else - and defining yourself means that you are one step closer to understanding yourself.
I think like a scientist. I want to define myself, and to do that I have to solidify an identity. For me, a very important part of identity is the place you call home. I can't decide whether it's only important because it's the one thing that for me has been impossible to find. It's true that identities are impermanent, and that things change, and people change, but I feel like for most people, a tangible home exists. A place that is familiar, comfortable and reassuring - and mostly it's the place they grew up.
In high school, I met people that hadn't lived in the same country for more than two years, people with four different passports, people that had grown up in Dubai: the city that nobody calls home. These people named themselves "global nomads" or "citizens of the world". However, I was never comfortable giving myself that name. Because I had obviously lived in Pakistan for 13 years, it was where I grew up. It was supposed to be my home and for a long time it had been my home. For all intents and purposes, it was my home every minute of every day that I was in Dubai. The only problem was that when I was in Pakistan, the place that I so desperately missed, all I wanted to do was go home. It confused me and it made me very uneasy. For some reason, having a tangible place to call home was and is very important to me. I constantly thought I was going home, but I could never quite get there. Andrew Largeman from Garden State put it so perfectly with the quote "It's like you get homesick for a place that doesn't exist." I just wish I had said it first. For me it has become an active struggle to find a place that I can call home, and if I do nothing else, I will make that place for myself somewhere.
-Mer
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I have for a while felt - and I believe Garden State agrees with me - that a home, and a life or a self for that matter, has more to do with how it is populated that what or where it is. Without the people around us our lives are meaningless (maybe) and without the people who teach us and feel with us and grow with us (and into us) I don't think a strong conception of self (or identity...) can develop either (maybe-er). I have a hunch (breakfast, dinner and lunch) that something similar is true of one’s conception of home.
As we move forward in life our ties with our families often diminish or at least take on different dimensions and this is probably why for some of us (myself included) our childhood home no longer feels like the home that exists in our memories/imaginations.
It’s not that I don’t think the physical location and appearance of a home aren’t important, but what I am trying to say is that I would rather build my home in a person, or in many people, than in a place.
I agree, but there's generally a place associated with those people. And building a home in a person is a great idea, but I don't think it follows through as smoothly. You can be in the middle of nowhere with that person, but it won't be home. People are great, and more important than most other things, but they're not all there is. You can make a home with a person, but I don't think you can make a home in a person.
You hit the nail on the head on what "home" means - somewhere familiar and comfortable. Familiarity breeds comfort, and these familiarities are what maintain our idea of home.
You're right again when you talk about how impermanence erodes familiarity and comfort. I've only been gone for a year, but already my house has changed and my friends have moved away.
Home is not wherever you're most familiar and comfortable at the present time, but instead is the place that was most familiar, most comfortable in your life. Does this mean that as students, we're bound to have no home to go to? If I'm not already, I'll soon be more comfortable here in Montreal than I am when I'm in Ontario. Still, the Ontario of my youth will be home, even if the Ontario of now is not.
I don't abandon hope for ever regaining a home. Once I have a family and my own house, familiarity and comfort will grow once more, and will grow into something stronger than it was in those 10 years in Ontario.
Until then, there can be no home to go back to.
that's pretty interesting. that home is the place that was most comfortable at some point in your life. i guess that's why it's so unattainable, because you never feel as comfortable and familiar and secure as you did as a child. until you find your own family, and all that jazz.
i like that thought.
I wouldn't necessarily say that what PWHAG suggested is unattainable.
For me, this past year has been discovering that "Home" is really anywhere that I am.
Perhaps the catalyst was having most of my close friends (a lot of who I considered integral to my "home") transplanted to another city -- and having to strain...to reach out past the vacumn that they had once occupied and re-orient myself without the aid of an imposed social ecosystem. I was doing alright, but the grip I had was shaky at best; my friends' lives in montreal seemed more home to me than my own city.
Traveling changed that in a few ways.
You are a certainly more seasoned traveller than I am -- But the nature of the travel, and your intentions definitely come into play when understanding it's effects.
For some can seem like a severing of the roots -- a departure from home.
But I feel like as I grew more and more comfortable with myself and my travels, I took more and more of the roots that I had developed. More like a retraction than a severance.
With that in mind, home is where you choose to drop your roots. Provided there is some semblance of soil, sunlight, and water, you will flourish.
When I travel with my family, I'm the one saying "let's go back to the hotel" when they say "let's go home"--i.e., and change before dinner. Over the summer I lived in a hotel for three months, and I never stopped calling it The Hotel. It acquired capitals, but it was never home.
It was only when I left home that I recognized what--and a little bit who--it was, and how much that meant to me. I think home, insofar as it means the state of greatest comfort and sense of belonging, can live in a person. But it's a dangerous transplant.
My new apartment is a comfortable zone, and I do call it home--but it's not anything like Home. At least yet.
5 took the home with him, when he travelled. When I came back from exotic lands, I tried hard to take the travel back home with me--to maintain the excitement and sense of wonder and discovery that accompanied being somewhere other than home. It didn't work, but it's something to add to this discussion--what's so good about home anyway? There are some people who prefer to wander.
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