Where is my home?
One cold afternoon, I left the library at Middlebury College with a box of food in my hand. The demanding schedule of our college combined with the workload from my job, had left me with no time for breakfast or lunch that day. After finishing my classes and job, I grabbed my foodbox, eager to return to my room for a much-needed meal and rest. Along the way, I bumped into one of my beloved professors, someone I have a close relationship with.
“Where are you going?” He asked.
“Oh, I am going home to eat my meal and rest for a bit,” I replied.
“I love it when you call your room home,” he replied with a smile.
This sentence stuck with me. Where is home, really? What is home? What can we call home?
If it was surprising for him that I called my dorm room home, then probably home is not a dorm room; it’s probably something else.
Home is probably where my family is.
Or probably where I was born,
Or where my biological relatives are,
Or what about friends? Do we call a place home where friends are?
Or where else is and isn’t home?
I don’t know.
I told Professor Hector that I call my dorm room home because it is where I feel peace.
Now rethinking about the definition of home, if I said that I call it home because I feel peace there, then probably for me home means “where I have peace.” If home is about wherever I feel peace, I wonder what I would call the home I was born and raised in? My birth country, Afghanistan, where there has been an ongoing war since I was born. We don’t know what peace is. I never experienced it there in my native country. Should I not call Afghanistan, where I was born and raised, home?
But peace could mean different things to different people. Maybe, I didn’t mean peace in terms of the security conditions in a country, but rather feeling the sense of peace inside.
If home means where I was born and raised or where my family is physically located, I was never home. I never actually felt what that home feels like. When I was in high school, I left home and started to live in a dormitory — it is how I still live. In my young life, I have spent most of my time away from home, my country, and family. If home is where we are born and raised, then many of us are in exile. In most cases we move to different locations throughout our lifetime. Pico Lyer in one of his TedTalks ‘Where is Home’ says that “Japanese kids have many homes; one with parents, another with a partner, another with friends, another where they study and many more” (TED, 2013).
I left Afghanistan, the country I was born and raised in, and the home where my family is located, although I did not choose to. War and the threat of violence forced me and thousands more, out. Now that I cannot return to the place I was born and raised, does that mean I have no home?
Pico Lyer also says “If home means a physical location, when my house burned to ashes, I had no physical location to point to as home” Like Lyer, I do not have a physical location to point to as home, or if I do, it is constantly changing.
What I wonder now is, since I do not have one fixed location to call home, does this mean I am not happy? How are home and happiness related?
Pico Lyer says that “When people ask me where is home, I think of my sweetheart, or the song that is traveling with me, the people I love…”( 2013). I resonate with what Lyer says here; home sometimes is not even a physical location; it can be a lot of things. Sometimes a bar gives me more peace and comfort than a home and a bed. Sometimes a friend is more than a sibling.
Sometimes sitting in a class with people who all enjoy discussing the same subject feels more like home than sharing a room with someone who has nothing in common with me.
Rebacca Solnit in A Field Guide to Getting Lost asks, “How do you go about finding the things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?”(2005). Here, Solnit illustrates that nothing is constant in life. She encourages us to embrace changes and the unknowns. I have finally developed the ability to embrace whatever changes life throws my way. I have learned not to tie my happiness to one thing, person, or place. I do not tie the sense of home to one physical location, one thing or one person or one family.
I have developed the ability to create a family and a home wherever I go.
Sometimes, we don’t know a person well but they become a part of our lives. You buy coffee everyday, and your relationship with the barista becomes a part of your life. You sit in the same class with people you never knew before, you walk around town meeting people you do not share any blood linkage with — all these little relationships are as valuable as biological relationships and they remind you every time that we do not need one biological family and one home to be happy. My college friends, professors, baristas, the person working in the dining hall, the people I meet around town, the countries I travel to, the food I enjoy from different countries, and the cultures I like trying are the unknowns that make up a big part of my life.
Lyer also says that our generation is the luckiest because we can choose the sense of home, and that we are not tied to one fixed home by birth like our ancestors were; and this is the greatest liberty (2013). I think not having one fixed sense of home also is the beauty of our generation`s life because life is about getting lost in discovering yourself, and creating the identity that you want for yourself, and not to live an entire life with the identity that was assigned to you by birth. I call this liberty happiness.
Wortk cited
TED. (2013, July 17). Where is Home? | Pico Iyer | TED [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m6dV7Xo3Vc
Solnit, Rebecca, author. (2005). A field guide to getting lost. New York :Viking
