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Home is …
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Home is… home is what?
Home is one of these words that come up regularly in conversation… closely related to the question “Where are you from?” Home is an idea I can’t get my mind around. I probably never will understand it, due largely to the fact that I have few experiences from my past to attach this term “home” to. A house comes to mind, certain people come to mind, but I don’t think the word “home” conjures up the same ideas in my mind as it does in others’.
However… that’s not always the case. I’ve found a couple movies, a couple books, a couple songs, and some people who talk about home and suddenly I realize… oh, wow! We’re talking about the “same” home (or lack thereof)! It suddenly hits me that when we talk about “home,” we’re both talking about the same imaginary thing.
A couple of quotes pointed me in the right direction. I read these and realized… wait a minute, there are others who are searching for what it means to have a “home:
- “One never reaches home… but where paths that have affinity for each other intersect the whole world looks like home, for a time.”
- from Hermann Hesse’s Damien.
- Despite the fact that I can’t wrap my mind around this idea of home, from time to time I feel so strongly the peace and security of my relationships with others. I think that’s what he talks about here. People traveling through life as seekers never really have a static home… but you experience the feelings of “home” nonetheless, in friendships and brief moments of intimacy with those around you.
- “You know that point in your life when you realize that the house that you grew up in isn’t really your home anymore? All of a sudden even though you have some place where you can put your stuff that idea of home is gone…. I miss the idea of it. Maybe that’s all family really is. A group of people who miss the same imaginary place.”
- from the film Garden State
- Couldn’t have said it better.
- “[All these people] admitted that they were strangers and aliens on earth. People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have an opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country - a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.”
- from the Bible, Hebrews 11:13
- the biblical story about the Hebrews traveling from place to place desperately trying to establish their own identity and “home” has always been fascinating to me. Firstly, you have Abraham leaving his homeland for reasons rather inexplicable to anyone else. Then you have a long history of a dispossessed nation trying to establish a “home” - first by creating a rather oppressive kingdom, and then by living as a subculture under someone else’s rule. Anyway, the Bible is chalk full of songs about “Zion” and “heaven.”
“Heaven” and “promised land” never made much sense to me until my dad (a TCK as well) suggested that he’s always pictured heaven as a place where we finally find a sort of “home” that simply isn’t possible here on earth. For me, that would be something like having all the great friendships I’ve ever had in one physical location - instead of split between hundreds of different places around the world.
Anyone had a similar experience? Anyone read or heard something about “home” and realized… wow, that person is speaking my language when they talk about “home?”
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August 24th, 2008 at 5:25 am
Wow! Good quotes there bdbhaiti. And nice insight on them. =)
(Is this spam?)
August 24th, 2008 at 3:26 pm
i think instead of asking where are you from…
we should ask, what’s your paradigm.
cuz technically…
the answer to where we are from…
goes back to biology class…LOL
But the point is, where are you from is just a bad way of wording the question because the truth is it doesn’t really matter to TCKs, in fact it potentially doesn’t matter to anyone who has the potential to migrate.
and tat is EVERYONE.
In the end what really matter is how you spent your time in a place, how long you’ve spent your time in a country, and how many places you’ve spent your times in.
(Is this spam?)