Meeting on "What is a home"

We had a small group last night discussing what makes a home.

A sense of safety, familiarity, connections with our love ones, and economic viability were agreed as the ingredients for making a place feel home like.

For modern day nomads, they arrange every new home they go to about the same way they did the last to get the sense of constancy as they have move from city to city.  We all need anchors in our lives to feel settled and choose different aspects to get this constancy.

The sense of safety is a personal evaluation and psychological.  We have all experienced the sense of home when crossing the border back to our home country.  Very often there is no immediate difference other than symbols of the flag but our mental feel is disproportionately large compared to the actual change in environment involved in crossing the border.

Our sense of safety is also disrupted in the case of a burglary into our home.  We may feel violated and not able to restore our sense of safety anymore.

This leads to the thinking that the sense of safety, so important in making us feel at home at any one location is mostly psychological.

I recall my university days when we moved up from renting a room to renting the top floor of an old house upon graduation.  There were no doors leading to the top floor to keep our living space separate from the tenants of the rest of the house and yet we never felt unsafe in that environment.

We may be young and naive then but it shows the blurry boundary of nativity versus hard experience. Where is the happy medium between blissful ignorance and inability to trust?

Joseph mentioned that he will not be able to return to his home town where he grew up as the economic circumstances have changed and there is no gainful employment to be had there anymore even though a lot of the people may still be there. This brought up the point that home is not just a location but that location also change with time. We may be nostalgic about that location because we have memories of the past there.  Nostalgia is more emotion over reality and best not relied on to be relived.

Connections to our loved ones, a sense of feeling welcomed are certainly major reasons for feeling at home. Sandra talked about feeling at home in regular annual events such as car shows where she can expect to see familiar faces and do familiar activities that reinforce her sense of belonging to that community as a strong feeling of being at home.

That may speak to the significance of festivals and major events such as Christmas, Thanksgiving and such where one's bonds with family and community are reinforced in a predictable, comforting fashion.

This is all good, but it still begs the question, why are we creatures of habit?

One answer may be that we need more brain power to deal with exceptional events and we would prefer more things to be routine so that we can relegate it to our subconsciousness.  We are not conscious of walking our familiar streets but stress and concentration sets in when we are in a strange environment that require us to watch every step.

Yet we become bored if routine dominate our lives. We yearn for travel and excitement, discovery.

We want well arranged, interesting travel that is safe, and to expectations.

Is there such a thing?

Maybe we travel just so that we can come home afterwards.