There’s no place like home, or so you thought: A Vignette
People say, “home is where the heart is,” but what does that really mean? What is the difference between making yourself feel at home and actually being home? Is there a difference? We have deep connections to the places that we call home; good and bad.
A child’s first time sleeping away from home is usually the first time that they experience the profound connection to the place they call home. To sleep in a place that is foreign to them, away from their parents, can make a child feel lost and out of sorts, there is a psychological reaction to this separation; and then they start to cry. From a young age we learn to align our entire universe with home. Where it is, who’s in it, how far away we are from it, and (eventually) how far away we can get from it.
A sanctuary, a place to sleep at night, somewhere you work. There are a lot of different things that can mean home. Some people spend most of their time in their homes, too afraid to come out because the real world is just too scary. Some people have no homes, they sleep on train cars or park benches. It doesn’t really matter where it is, or what you do there, but it seems to me that human nature demands we carve out a space for ourselves (and our families) and call it home. For some people home means a great deal to them because of the people in it. Following the death of a family member, people can have trouble letting go of the items they left behind, because there is a sentimental attachment to those items. Sometimes there is no attachment at all; which can be because there was no attachment to the person, or there is no attachment to the space. Of course, one’s idea of home and their attachment to it, depends on their childhood and the kind(s) of home(s) they had growing up. It was different for the apostolics of Zimbabwe; they held onto the importance of their religion and beliefs without the attachments to sentimental items. In fact, the inclusion of religious items like a sculpture, crucifix, or even the bible detracted from the message that Christianity was trying to spread. For the apostolics the holy spirit was everywhere and took no residence in material artifacts.
But what makes a space feel like home? If you were to imagine what home is to you, do you think of the structure, the furniture, your bed, your family, your pets? What do you have to do in your home in order to make it a home? My friend is a paralegal and her boss bought a house that he turned into the office, but he still lives upstairs. Personally, I would never be able to live in the same place that I work; but perhaps he is more devoted to his work than most other people.
For my project I plan on researching the way black women business owners imagine their own success. Both of these ideas involve the similar factors. What was your childhood like, where do you imagine yourself in the future, and what hegemonic ideology tells you to believe… I don’t think that it is possible to imagine your success without factoring in your home, and what your home life is like. These ideas can shift over time as you change, and your surroundings change. As we get older we break free from what we were taught and we design our own worlds and what we want the things in our lives to look like.
