Home

Sept. 6

Home is a place of comfort. You share a home with people you care about and who, assumedly, care about you.  For many, home is a place you can simply be yourself, away from the ‘outside’ world that asks you to constantly reshape yourself to fit the needs of that ‘non-home’ place. Home is an extension of yourself, a mirror of your personality welcoming you into a comfortable embrace of the familiar.  For a vast number of people, home is something cultivated over time.  Occasionally we have false starts, short-term living situations (such as college) or places that match our early-career economics, but even then, we endeavor to shape the place into a well-fit glove.

Although I have a space that has been my slowly cultivated ‘home,’ sometimes I think of it more as a transitional space that permanently houses things I value, that I can visit on occasion to then carry off a few of those items to my next homespace.  In essence, I have cultivated an ability to create home in ever-new spaces.  I don’t mean the home of material goods that are a mirror of my own life, rather the home that supports the rhythms and comfort of my daily life. 

As visitors to a new place, we feel compelled to get out of the ‘sleeping box’ and get into the life of the newly visited place. We are not creating a home, not even close.  We embrace the experience of being a stranger in a place because that is the joy of visiting – experiencing the new.  As my mother is wont to say, ‘This is very different.’ Home, then, is a place to return and relax, to think back on the fond memories of the visit to that richly ‘different’ place.

For me, I seek to create home when I travel, as so much of my travel is about creating a daily life rhythm.  I recall my first Fulbright-Nehru fellowship in 2010.  My first few days were restless.  I felt compelled to get out of the apartment and do something, see something, make the best of that adventure I was then beginning.  It took me some time to embrace a daily set of routines that allowed me to accept the fact that I was going to be home-bound on occasion and not to worry about it.  It’s not that I didn’t get out to visit and travel about.  I most certainly did.  But I discovered, very late in that experience, that the visiting and traveling I ended up doing mirrored very closely the way I travel about when I am in my own long-held home. 

As I arrived in India this time around, a couple of the first thoughts I had were, ‘Wow, I’ll have time to write and read!’  Now, staying indoors when on an ‘adventure’ might not be the first choice of many, but I know that my adventure will come as I get to know my new home and the people I will be sharing time with.  My new home will reveal itself in unexpected ways that, for me, will be richer and more fulfilling than simply snapping pictures of well-publicized attractions.  I will relish my living situations, my work, my time at ‘home,’ and regular chances to get out and about for exciting experiences and the excitement of living a ‘normal’ life in a ‘different’ place.  I have lived in India for the sum total of about a year over the past 15 years…and I still haven’t seen the Taj Mahal.  I am sure that when I do, though, it will be as a short jaunt from wherever my local ‘home’ is at the moment. Much the same as the people living next door to me.