On going home

What do you consider “home”? The place you grew up? Where you went to school? Or were you a wandering soul that never put down roots? “Home” is a very difficult concept to define with any kind of objectivity or certainty. I would love to idealize this all out of proportion, but that would be too easy. The truth of the matter is highly complex and chaotic. One can spend an inordinate amount of time in a place and never feel at home, but even just a few days might suffice to convince you that a new place is really where your heart is at. I think that home must have something to do with the heart or the soul or some other ephemeral and subjective criteria that is completely irrational and totally inexplicable. We know we are home when we get there, and we also know when we are long way from home. Perhaps the concept of home is forged in our hearts when we are young and impressionable, when we are vulnerable and need protecting, forged by a sturdy roof over our heads and a warm meal on the table where we are always welcome any time of the day or night. Or maybe it’s none of that. At some point in our lives we forge an identity, we come to recognize ourselves as proceeding from some place, and when asked where we are from, we name a place. We spend most of our lives leaving home, moving out, living far away, yearning for that comfort and safety that we felt as children when we were being watched over. The nostalgia we feel for home is never felt so keenly as when we most go to some place foreign for work or school or whatever avatars and caprices befall one in the normal course of a life. We spend all of our time trying to get away from home, remake our identifies as adults, take our philosophies new and unknown places, make a living, create a new home for our family in an unfamiliar setting. And we live our lives far away from our homes. I often get the feeling that contemporary society is less and less concerned with a person’s hometown, an idea which is being washed away by the increasing mobility of every level of society. Many, many people no longer identify any place as home, which makes me wonder, have we gained a more universal identity or have we lost something very essential, something important. Paradoxically, going home is a risky venture if there ever was one. One is a child at home, and as one moves away, one establishes a new identity, but as we go back, we put on our old clothes and become a child again. Of course, we also run the risk of realizing how small our home town really is, how short the buildings, how narrow the streets, how tiny was the house we grew up in. The nostalgic golden age of our youth probably never existed at all except as an over-idealized dream constructed in our minds in a moment of loneliness and dread when yearning for another time and place was easier than facing the cold, harsh realities of a new place. Going home will always force us to see the realities of our childhoods, for good or for bad, and we must examine who we think we are, which may be different than the constructed personality we present to the world on a daily basis. Going home is about facing our most base fears about our short-comings, our failings, our lost dreams. Yet going home can also be about the people who made us who we are today, who shaped us, who educated us, who raised us and put us the road to adulthood, who made us successful, who forged us in the flames of childhood, once and for all times, making us who we are today. Going home is about looking in a mirror, darkly, and taking a good, long look at the truth about ourselves, and that might not be entirely a bad thing at all.