I’ve been thinking about the concept of home a lot recently.
In the modern day, we carry around a bunch of different and somewhat contradictory notions of what home is. Home is where we keep our belongings, a physical and specific container referenced to us, but home can also be “where the heart is”: in this usage, home can be a lifestyle, another person, nature. We can feel “at home” working fourteen hour days, or at synagogue, or reading a book curled by a friend’s fire. In fact, so diverse are the usages of home that it is safe to say literally anything carries the potentiality to be a home. The only requirements are for a person to articulate it as such.
The word home didn’t always carry this flexibility. The word moves through the Old English Ham “dwelling place, fixed residence, region” all the way back to the PIE *Tkei, “to settle, dwell, be home.” The word’s roots are rooted, literally. It’s not surprising, then, that linguists admit that our use of home today belongs only to itself, the range of its meanings not covered by any single etymological route.
Can we blame the explosion of the term home on nothing more or less than the increased globalization and transience of native English speakers? Is its transformation as simple as the necessary adaptation of an external, physical space to an internal, felt space for bodies that don’t stay put?
Maybe. But what I find interesting in that possibility is that rather than shed the concept of home, we mutated it beyond recognition in order to carry it with us. The modern human, computer shrunk down to a smart phone in their pocket, perfectly-optimised carry on luggage in hand, relying on technologies of convenience–Uber, Airbnb, Seamless–has not outgrown their need for home. Even those who boldly claim to have no home, to be citizens of the world, have just replicated a different home.
When we look at the word this way, its tone changes slightly. Home in its broadest sense is the experience of being in harmony, to feel that whatever note we are striking is in concord with the other notes we are surrounded by, both internally and externally. It is to feel cohesion, rather than fragmentation, even if (inevitably) things aren’t perfect.
That’s why we can hate the color of the walls in one room of our house and still feel a kind of fondness towards them upon return, why we can feel at home while suffering at the gym, why returning to a childhood home can bring up acute nostalgia while we simultaneously recognize everything about that home–that life–that we wouldn’t choose for ourselves as adults. It is home because it fits, because even in its falling short, it is exactly what it is supposed to be.
No wonder, then, that we haven’t outgrown the term. Home is that rare space of comfort and contentment, where we are able to lay down our incessant slog of becoming and just be.
Home is wherever we are when we are ourselves and that is enough.