Growing up, and until quite recently, I thought of home as just that: a cliche. Surely a home is just a house people romanticize. Home is so many wonderful things that, I feel, society plays up in order to escape more pressing issues in society and "home" is their escape from these issues. What more could there possibly be to a house? For a while I believed it went hand-in-hand with a similar phrase along the lines of, "home is what you make it." So I suppose home really is where you go to break from some of those issues, however I still couldn't wrap my head around it, not really. It all makes sense, but I just couldn't understand it. What is a home? I've lost countless hours of sleep during the passed year because this question haunts my dreams and is always poking about in the back of my head. I've wrestled this dilemma with thoughts of, "I have a house. I go there every day after work, but why can't I call it home? Why don't I have one?" It was driving me crazy.
Thankfully I have come to realize that I do, in fact have a home. One day a thought struck me. What if a home isn't something tangible or something you can see? What if home is a memory or a feeling, and it isn't a physical place at all? Of course to some people a house very well may be a home. Their home is made up of windows, walls, doors, and filled with picture frames, furniture, and things.
I've learned, however, that my home is none of these things. It is an attachment to people and emotions. I may live in a different house, but my home is somewhere else entirely. That house and those people may be gone-be it far away or otherwise-but the happiness and warmth the nostalgia brings me remains close. My home is a memory, but not forgotten.
People also like to go on about how living in the past is a bad idea. We shouldn't live in the past, and I agree with them completely. It seems like a huge contradiction to everything I've said so far, but it's true. Living in the past can make us hold on to our regrets and anger, but I don't live there. Although my home is in the past, I don't live there; I visit it from time to time.
One of my favorite lines of literature comes from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and it reads, "Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure." This is my home. It doesn't go to say that I've forgotten the bad, unlucky, or less than desirable experiences. No, those situations and people (along with some good influences also), have made me who I am. They have made me the person I go to sleep with each night and the person I wake up to every morning, and I'm not altogether unhappy with myself. I'd be lying if I said I was happy with who I am because I don't think anyone ever truly is with themselves, not entirely. However, I tell myself that where I am now isn't where I'm supposed to end up and that I can't stop just yet.
Forgive me, I digress. What my point is, is that home isn't always a destination. Knowing this, I have at last come to terms with that dreadful and out of date phrase. Home really is where your heart is, it's just a matter of finding out where that is first.
"Where we love is home-home that our feet may leave, but never our hearts." -Oliver Wendell Holmes
