Where Is Home?

One some level, the old adage “home is where the heart is” rings true when we take the time to ponder where home is for us.

I’m currently more than a week into a two-week stay in Palm Springs, a place I consider my second home. But when I thought about that this morning, it made me wonder what home is to me.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines the noun home these ways.

1a: one’s place of residence : domicile
1b: house
2: the social unit formed by a family living together
3a: a familiar or usual setting : congenial environment
3b: habitat
4a: a place of origin
4b: headquarters
5: an establishment providing residence and care for people with special needs
6: the objective in various games

All those definitions make sense. Home is indeed all those things. But I’ve come to adopt the mindset that anywhere I am at the moment that feels like a reliable base of daily operations is home.

My hotel room can be home.

Staying at a friend’s place can be home.

Settling into my seat during a long plane flight can be home.

Sitting in a park reading a book can be home.

When I attend an event at which many of my close friends have gathered, that can be home.

Perhaps it’s a throwback to my somewhat nomadic life in my early years, but I’ve always felt “at home” wherever I landed.

In “Home Is Where the Heart Is, but Where Is ‘Home’?,” Frank T. McAndrew, PhD., offers some insight to how we decide where home is.

As you reflect upon where your home is, ask yourself why this particular place out of the many places that you may have lived stands out as the one that feels like home. By doing so, you may also gain a deeper understanding of how you think about yourself and your connection with the world at large.

Writer Pico Iyer discusses where is home in this TED Talk. With so many people living far away from where they were born and raised, or even in another country, is home where we were born or where we are at the moment?

Where you come from now is much less important than where you’re going. More and more of us are rooted in the future or the present tense as much as in the past.

That resonates with me. I see my identification of home as something that evolves, sometimes daily. It certainly evolves over time. But Iyer hits the nail on the proverbial head when he says this.

And home, we know, is not just the place where you happen to be born. It’s the place where you become yourself.

Iyer is alluding to how I feel when I travel or move about this country or globe. My sense of home resides inside me when I feel most like myself. As Iyer puts it, it’s the sense of calm and stillness inside that evokes a feeling of home.

I began to think that really, movement was only as good as the sense of stillness that you could bring to it to put it into perspective.

Iyer recounts a story when he experienced such stillness. It was slowing down, sitting still, being with oneself without the distractions of the day-to-day grind most of us all experience, which evoked a sense of stillness, a sense of home.

Then Iyer says this.

It’s only by stopping movement that you can see where to go.

That made so much sense. I realized that when someplace feels like home to me, whether it’s San Francisco, Palm Springs, or a hotel room in Berlin, it feels like home because in each of those and many other places I feel like I can be still and be entirely myself.

Iyer ends with this.

But movement, ultimately, only has a meaning if you have a home to go back to. And home, in the end, is of course not just the place where you sleep. It’s the place where you stand.

I can finally make some sense of why so many places feel like home to me. It’s not the physicality of the location. It’s not where all my stuff is stored. It’s not the place where my mail is delivered. No, it’s where I can stand. Stand freely. Stand connected to others. Stand and look around and appreciate beauty. Stand in a place where I can most be my authentic self.

I hope you find a place or places where you can stand and feel the joy of the life experience in a place or places you can fondly call home.

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