Home
I have always had a fascination with the concept of “home”. I am not sure if this fascination is because I am a self-described homebody who would rather spend a vacation close to home than traveling the globe (that is slowly beginning to change in my advancing years) or if the fascination is more base, the idea of home simply a part of being human. Even if it is a universal understanding, I am continuously fascinated by how home is described by other people. A friend of mine, even though she is in her late 20s and on her own, still considers “home” wherever her parents live. For others, home is where they grew up, regardless if they or their parents live there still. I've always half-jokingly taken the phrase “home is where your clothes are” and changed it to “home is where your books are” to be more applicable to my priorities.
The main reason I have given this so much thought recently is because of a song that won't stop haunting me. It is one of those songs that is unbearably beautiful both lyrically and musically. The refrain goes: “In the cathedrals of New York and Rome / There is a feeling that you should just go home / And spend a lifetime finding out just where that is”. I believe what is especially haunting for me is two-fold. First, as a self-proclaimed homebody, I have never seen the cathedrals of New York and Rome. So many wonders of the world have been brought to me only by images, not by experience. And second, "home” may very well be something even more intangible than where my books are. Home may be wherever I'm at, with or without my books, and it may take a lifetime to truly learn that.
I remember in college how I felt, at some level, that I was never at home. When I was on my college campus in Chicago, I would talk about “home” as being Minneapolis, where I grew up and where my parents lived. When I was in Minneapolis, on school breaks, I would talk about “home” as being Chicago and my college campus. I think that was the beginning of a realization that my longing for a place to call home would always trump a physical location labeled as “home”. My parents have since moved on and I love visiting them in their saltbox house in Door County, but it isn't my home. I love my apartment and enjoy returning to it everyday after work, but even in such a place that is very “me” and full of my stuff and a wonderful place to read, play, and relax, it doesn't feel completely like home.
A different song by a group I especially liked in college, has a song that describes a God-shaped hole that is in all of us and can only truly be filled by God. Maybe “home” is just that for me—a hole within that only serves to remind me that I never will be entirely complete this side of heaven. I don't know. Maybe my longing for a place to call home is just another lesson teaching me to be content with where I am at, but to also remain perpetually hopeful for more.