On home

What does home mean to you?  Are you comfortably reading this at home, or are you away from your creature comforts and family, on the road somewhere? The dry, clinical, definition of home is a place where one dwells permanently, especially as a member of a family or household.  It’s a place of residence or refuge, where one experiences a sense of belonging, safety, and attachment.  I think it’s much deeper than this.  

If you were to ask a series of random people their definition, I think many would provide a different answer.  Someone may say the house they grew up in as a child, or the area of the country they’re originally from.  A refugee may say their native country; tragically, one they may struggle to ever return to.  A lovesick teenager would probably say in the arms of their lover.  Others may say wherever their family is, wherever they’ve been deployed to, or some shoebox of an apartment in their favourite city neighbourhood.  

I believe that home is wherever you’re able to make it.  But there are numerous conditions to make it feel like home.  It isn’t a definitive space, place, or location.  Emotion, attachment, and ethereal feelings are a large factor.  I know army brats who have been dragged around continents, never settling, as a parent is serving.  I also know people who have, somehow, never moved out of the street they were born and raised on.  Maybe both are equally happy.  

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, although flawed, states that after all your basic physiological needs are met, being safe, secure, and loved, are two and three on the hierarchy.  In theory this means living in a low crime area, in a modern building, with secure doors, with the one you love is enough.  For many it probably is.  But is it as simple as this?  For some, to achieve the feeling of home is so much more than this. 

The late, great, Robin Williams once said “...the worst thing in life is being with people who make you feel alone.”  If you’re not attached to the people you live with, or worse, abused by them, then where you live will never be home to you.  Likewise, if the area you live in doesn’t satisfy some needs, or you have no attachment, even if the location is ‘nice,' then it too will never feel like home.  

I can personally testify to this.  The house and village I grew up in were both lovely.  However, at the time, I was deeply unhappy and uncomfortable in the house.  Looking back, on paper, it should have been an idyll, but it was far from it for me.  This is my point.  ‘Home’ to each and every one of us is so personal, with so many immeasurable and unquantifiable factors, that I believe if you find somewhere that you’ve turned into your home and you’re very happy there, you are truly lucky and in a unique position.  

No one size fits all when it comes to a home.  Yes, these days, with cookie cutter houses, society is pushing for a one size fits all.  They are houses, not homes.  Look at large scale housing developments and apartment buildings.  They boil down to little more than somewhere to sleep between the grinding daily rituals of modern life.  Not somewhere to relax and actually live.  If you’re fortunate enough to own a house, if it’s modern, I’d wager some money that your garden is small.  Lost are the days when you could have a vegetable patch, an orchard, or even enough space for a fish pond, play set or trampoline, and still have some grass area to spare.  Modernization and progress are to blame for this.  Trying to squeeze as much revenue from a patch of land as possible means you need to be able to house as many people as possible.  Gone are ‘decent’ gardens, genuine private areas with anything more than a 6ft fence separating boundaries, and even driveways.  But this isn’t a new problem.  I recently read a volume that described Dorset towns and villages.  It was written just over 100 years ago and the author was bemoaning the ‘modern’ housing that was being built with red tiled roofs.  Traditional cob houses with thatch or slate roofs, giving way to lead bricks from London, with red roofs, with no thought given to proximity or aesthetics.  Doesn’t that sound familiar?  Maybe in a hundred year’s time, the modern neighbourhoods of today will be looked on with a romantic favouritism.  I shudder at the thought!  

Going back to Mr. Williams’ statement, if where you currently reside doesn’t, or cannot feel like home for you, then can you ever be truly happy and satisfied in life.  According to Maslow, maybe not.  I know that I’ve been searching for my whole life for somewhere to call home.  Once the ‘honeymoon’ period of somewhere new has worn off, that original sense of happiness also wears off.  I’m fortunate in that I know where I consider home to be.  

Some insight into my definition of a home:

A property from the turn of the 18th or 19th centuries, in the south of England, where my roots are deeply buried.  Large rooms, high ceilings, large windows with lots of natural light.  Spacious mature gardens with enough space for some chicken and bees, with mature fruit trees.  Enough rooms for visiting family, with a large country kitchen to prepare honest meals, from scratch.  Original period features, but with just enough modernisation that utility bills aren’t stiflingly expensive.  The ability to have lazy mornings, with the windows open, freshly brewed coffee, relaxing with the one I love, listening to the wind in the trees and the birds sing.  A nice claw foot bath tub in a bathroom with storage and of course, the most essential item of all, a real fireplace, where logs can be burned on cold, stormy evenings, enjoying the company of one’s loving partner quietly listening to music or reading.  

Did I just describe my current abode?  Absolutely not, far from it.  But one day.  I know where the ideal location to live is.  It isn’t where I’m at now.  But one day I will be.  What is currently a fantasy, will one day come to fruition.  Maybe then I’ll be able to truly relax and say ‘I’m home.’  I hope, dear reader, you have already found your definition of home.