Perhaps home is not a place, but simply an irrevocable condition.
James Baldwin
As these holidays draw near, the atmosphere changes, the air shifts, into something unexplainable. Bags are now packed; doors are now closed with all those footsteps now being heard with both excitements, nostalgia with slight touch of heavy heart. Everyone is going “home”. Yet, somewhere in this familiar ritual, a quiet question bothers my mind: what is home, really?
The concept of home seems pretty obvious at first. People experience it every day without giving much thought to it. But the more closely we look, the more it escapes its definition. No single definition really holds up under scrutiny. Home involves more than just a spot to sleep or store old photos. It acts as a key site for people to link back with who they truly are. This area functions in dual ways. It provides physical protection from the world outside. At the same time, it offers a kind of inner sanctuary.
The Psychology of Return.
Psychologists have long studied, analysed, and viewed home as the foundation of one’s identity. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs places belonging just above safety, as survival alone is not enough. WE, as emotionally sentient beings, crave for recognition, acceptance, and a sense of being rooted somewhere; of belonging somewhere.
Carl Jung would perhaps have referred to home as our psychic integration, that time when our conscious and unconscious selves harmonise without conflict. To come home, therefore, is not merely a physical action. It is the mind’s means of getting back into alignment, a quiet recalibration with being and higher.
The Philosophical Weight of Belonging.
Being at home in the world that is what philosophy ultimately strives for.
Martin Heidegger
Philosophers, though, have always felt that the concept of home comes with both comfort and tension. Heidegger wrote of unheimlich, or “unhomeliness”, the uncanny feeling of being a stranger, even in familiar environments (yay, college life mentioned). Contemporary life, with its velocity and screens, tends to make us spiritually homeless, floating between coordinates without mooring.
Jean-Paul Sartre would contend that the freedom we’re so proud of the infinite possibility of being anywhere, doing anything, being anyone has a curse attached to it: we can no longer find our place, hence belonging to nowhere.
To belong, however, is to make a boundary and freedom hates boundaries.
Yet perhaps, I believe it is this particular paradox that makes home sacred. The concept, the awareness, the strange feeling that as of this moment, we could exist anywhere, with anyone. This deepens the meaning of the place we choose to call ours. Home could never become confinement, but clarity. It tells you: yes, the world indeed is infinite, and you are not lost within it, and you never will be till the day you have “home” and the people in it.
The Emotional Architecture of Home.
The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.
Maya Angelou
Beyond all these insane psychological theories, all the metaphysics stuff, home remains achingly human. It is the ultimate collection of all those small yet inevitable aspects: the ever-lingering scent, the smell of fresh food, the way sunlight falls on the same walls each morning, the rumbling mumbles and sounds of laughter that stays even when people are busy, carried by their own work. It is always so… lively.
To set out from home is to feel a strange eerie dislocation, as though you leave behind part of yourself, patiently waiting. To come back is to discover that the space has been waiting for you too. Each object remembers; each fragment of silence remembers. And in that reunion, something that is lost in the world outside is quietly mended.
“Home remembers us, even when we forget ourselves.”
Infinite Roads, One Return.
We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
T.S. Eliot
In the end, I can fairly conclude that home is both noun and verb: a place and a process. We are blessed by it, we then build it, outgrow it, lose it but in the end, finally rediscover it. Sometimes it is found in people, sometimes in one’s own solitude, sometimes in that quiet realization of knowing that no matter how far we travel; there will always be a point of return, be it in space, in memory or within our own consciousness.
Because to belong somewhere is to remember who we are when the world stops demanding that we be someone else.
Discover more stories on Her Campus at MUJ. More articles by me coming soon at Vaibhav Chaudhary at HCMUJ; he who watches the world and its miracles closely, noticing what slips between moments, between the infinite realities.