I’ve had a certain blog post on my mind for quite some time. It’s one that I’ve been carrying around for several months, dragging it awkwardly behind me on all my travels like a roller suitcase with dodgy wheels. Perhaps it’s the rather cumbersome nature of the thought which has meant it’s taken me so long to actually sit down and write it out. Or perhaps it’s just a question of location – of not having had somewhere to sit down for long enough, and quietly enough, to let the process of contemplation work its way through to some kind of conclusion.
For it is, in some ways, a question of location – or at least, being located – that I want to write about. It’s the question of where we are located, of how we are located, and what it is that keeps us there – for me, it’s all question of Home.
As someone who’s done a fair bit of moving house of late, “home” (and what that means as a concept) is something which features as a rather prevailing thought in my little brain. I’ve been wondering about it a lot. Wondering what or where “home” really is. Wondering how you decide that you are at home – or, indeed, know that you are not. And wondering, why is home so very important, why does it matter, and why do I even need to ask the question?
There are lots of poems about home, songs about home, and a great deal of sayings, all of which might help us in answering some of these questions. The most obvious of course is the classic, the one we find embroidered on scatter cushions and emblazoned on doormats - “Home”, we are told, “ is where the heart is”.
This, I think, is perhaps more of a platitude than a saying, for is it not something of an obvious truth that “home is where the heart is”? Our homes are indeed our lifeblood, as essential to our being as the heart which beats steadily inside us. They are the place in which we spend our formative years as children growing up, the place we return to after a hard day’s work or a trip away, and the place we long for when we are exhausted by life and want somewhere to lay our heavy heads. Home is the place we can go when we want nothing more than to hide from the world. It’s a place of privacy, of safety, of security. It’s the place we feel we can be ourselves. And hopefully, if we’re really lucky, it’s a place which is full of love.
So what happens when, for whatever reason, we leave our homes and make the decision (or have the decision made for us) to move? If home is where the heart is, does a move away constitute leaving behind a little –or a lot – of our hearts in the physical location of the building we call ‘Home’? Is it the place which makes the home, the physicality of the building, the geographical location, the people in it? Or is home the heart that we bring to a place in virtue of carrying it always inside us? Is home a place we need to go out into the world to find (or to make), or is it a place we carry inside us so intrinsically that no matter where we are it will always find us?
And furthermore, by way of a culmination of all these questions, the most burning of all is this – If, as the saying goes, home is where the heart is and heart and home really are so essentially related, I can’t help but wonder - in the words of Jimmy Ruffin - what becomes of the broken hearted? Do they end up homeless? Or just living in a broken home?
Even as I write this post now, I struggle to find answers to these questions. Perhaps because there are none. But one thought which occurs to me is that whatever the relation between heart and home, when either are lost, broken or moved away from, there is one thing left behind which is common to them both, and that’s memory.
It’s memories we are left with when a relationship ends and we find ourselves trying to mend our broken heart. It’s memories we are left with when we leave the physical precinct of that place we call ‘Home’ and try to make another home elsewhere. And – in both cases - it is our memories which are the source and means of the process of reconstruction; they are the foundation upon which we can begin to rebuild, and they are the tools we use to guide us in the design of our new beginnings.
In relationships we often find ourselves drawn to partners who ‘remind us’ of someone else – a past partner, a much loved family member, or someone else we hold in high regard. Conversely it sometimes happens that a memory of something unsettling, painful or sad might make us deliberately seek out someone who seems entirely different to what we are used to.
So too the same applies in the context of home. We often remark that a place “feels like home” or indeed that we feel “a long way away from home”. Anyone who has ever flat hunted or viewed houses with a view to buy will identify with that instinctive feeling you get when you first walk through the door of a property. And I’m sure that many of us have felt similarly when visiting another part of the country or a different part of the world – some places just to seem to fit, others make us reach for our passport and the next flight home.
It’s the sense of the familiar, a point of correlation with a memory held deep within, which makes us feel at home or not – be it in the literal sense or in terms of a relationship. And it’s often the satisfaction of completing the journey we make to get there that reinforces for us whether we really have arrived in the right place. Like a perfect cadence in a chord progression, the journey home and the arrival at that place of familiarity, is a logical progression towards a natural conclusion – we know when we have arrived, we know we are meant to stop and rest, and we can finally enjoy the satisfaction of a long, silent sigh of relief.
But it’s memory I think which gets us there. It’s memory which provides the roadmap, the directions, and the means of travel. To steal a quote from writer Terry Tempest Williams, “memory is the only way home”. Ignore those memories, discount their validity, and it’s likely that in either context – finding a home or building a relationship - we are likely to find ourselves wandering, lost, floating without an anchor somewhere all at sea.
I’ve been trying to find somewhere to settle and feel at home for a while over the best part of the last year, and so I know only too well why it is so important. I can well sympathise with the journey Dorothy makes in The Wizard of Oz to find her way back home, and the sense of yearning she has to get back there. But yellow brick roads are sadly not always easy to find, and in the absence of an actual physical place to call home – a place to finally unpack that suitcase with the dodgy wheels – it would seem all the more important that we feel at home in an entirely different sense, and that’s the feeling of being at home with oneself.
Ok, so we may not all be seafaring folk but I am sure we can all identify on differing levels with what it feels like to be “all at sea”. Perhaps you know what it feels like to feel buffeted by the waves, subject to the providence of a calm or stormy sea, to be caught unawares and unprepared in the midst of harsh weather . You know what it feels like to sense the cold jolt of spray upon your skin and the sting of salt in your eyes and to be swept away by an overwhelming current. You know what it feels like to have lost your compass and experience the desperate yearning for some sign of light on the horizon, a beacon to guide you ashore.
Sometimes for whatever reason, you can’t get to where “home” is. Maybe you’ve lost your way, a road is blocked, or it’s just not there anymore for you to visit. Maybe that storm you’ve been caught in is too thick and too impenetrable to find that glimmering lighthouse on the horizon and sail on back in land. So what can you do? You can drop anchor where you are. Sometimes it’s just a question of isolating where that anchor is and what that means for you. I guess that’s why we all need a reliable crew of family and friends to make the journey with us – for often they can point out where that anchor is an a way that we had not seen ourselves.
Failing that, I guess the other option is to call up the Good Witch of the North and find out just where we can get ourselves a pair of those Ruby Red slippers Dorothy wore. Now there’s a good excuse to go out and buy impractical sparkly shoes if ever I heard one – a direct route back to our own personal Kansas!
After all, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like Home...
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