With recent events leading us to be left at home more and more often we have all been afforded the time for introspective thinking. My thoughts this time around have left me thinking about the concept known as home.
I use to think of home as being some actually place, maybe a place where I grew up. However, when my thoughts turn to those places I don’t feel that they come anywhere near the idea of home. I remember the old saying home is where the heart is. When I think of that simple idea I ask myself where is my heart, and when I find it there what odes it mean for me to say, “home is where the heart is.”
Yes, there is a place I can say I know where my heart is. One an actual place so to speak but both place and the idea of home exist purely in an idealistic form.
This place I speak of I consider home because when I was there I felt freer than I ever had before. I had never felt so free, no judgment, no expectation nor have I ever felt so accepted and so loved. I was genuine and sincere when I was there and that was reciprocated back to me. I could be the main charter to my own story or a background charter to another play being performed on the stage of life.
The other place I consider home is in the hearts and minds of those who are genuine and of those close I hold close enough to share my life with, as that’s the only place I can ever exist. A place where you are acknowledged and accepted, loved, known and not judged.
Now that I think about it, home is a space where the voiceless can construct an identity where people can also grow to accept and love themselves. They can be loved. To love a friend, to love a person to love a place is knowing happiness they bring in you. I think that many of us have an idea of that place “home” that we often lose ourselves chasing. Over time I think we lose the idea and begin chasing the idea of being home, further losing ourselves to the idea.
Home though is another place, a place that we construct within ourselves. We fool ourselves into think that, home is a place, a person that we can find happiness in but ultimately the heart and mind we must find happiness in most of all is ourselves. A space that it is our own, a space that is our of our own doing and of our own construct. Often we allow that space to succumb to the forces in and around us that we build an idea that isn’t really our own, and we never really find happiness chasing something that isn’t even ours to begin with.
I know that I too have a romantic idea of what home is and what home could be but that is evolving, as I learn to love the home within myself.