Home is Where the Safe is
‘Home is where the heart is’ they say. ‘Home is where you are’ is another one. This is what they used to say but now it has evolved and become the saying that will become the slogan of our times: ‘stay home.’ Just that, two words. Not ‘stay in your houses to protect yourselves’ or ‘stay in your houses to be safe’ but ‘stay home.’
Just as the saying has changed, so has our lives. They have been turned upside down and the outside has become the inside. Celebrities have taken to their smartphones to record their messages to tell us to stay at home, directors have made films with only an artist and an audience, animators have recreated classics to give us a bit of a laugh, the entertainment industry has given us the chance to see their gems for free, and everyday people have used Youtube to send out messages that they would have probably not done before. As far as I have seen (and I am going to get a bit Love Actually right now) there have been very few cases where these actions have not been done with the best intentions.
They have all been focused on one thing, to keep us at home. To just make us stay at home. Just two words charged with so many emotions and so much meaning. Our homes have become our castles with moats all around, protecting us, keeping our loved ones safe so we can see them again when all this passes over.
There are people who are really all alone. They have no internet, they have no company and they only have a home to be in. And yet, they have a home that is alive with memories and aromas. It is familiar, it is what they made of it, it has, by now, become their very self.
Home, the place where we have all been longing to be. We have no time to sit on our couches we said. We have no time to write that book, to watch that film, to do the spring cleaning, to clear out the garage, to sort out the old and put some new touches to our homes. Now we do. Now we can pause for a while and stop saying ‘I want to go home’ after a hard day at work or after a rough day at school (unless you are a teenager with a crush on one of your classmates).
There are always two sides to everything. No one has posted a video online of the rise in domestic violence right now. No one has posted a video of how they are forced to share a home with a husband or wife who they know are cheating on them. No one, as far as I know, has taken to social media, on a personal level, to tell the world that their home has become a dungeon where a fiery dragon is keeping everyone away so it can torture its prisoner.
We have been told to stay at home. Just that. So if you are well at home, if you have no dragons, no ghosts, no devils taunting you, then know that this time will never come again. This is time giving itself back to you, paying you back for using it on other things when you could have been using it on yourself. Use it to reflect on yourself, it may be hard, some of us haven’t really seen ourselves for a long time, but rage against the notion of confinement and come out stronger. Make a plan to get the job you always wanted, to go to that country you thought you could never go to, to create a project that has been on your mind for ages, to start a family, to add onto your family, to cook that cake you thought would make you fat, to learn how to knit, to learn a musical instrument. The list is endless but the time we have to complete the list is not.
Stay home. Grab the opportunity. See you. Get to know you again.
