Everyday Musings > Welcome home

V and I watch a channel four show - Grand Designs. It’s a show on people who set out to make their Dream Home. It’s fascinating to see how far they go to make it come true. Some build in the middle of nowhere with volunteers and local materials, some ship a entire framework across the sea, some rebuild an old barn or church and almost all stretch their funds with mortgages. And when it’s all done, it would seem that they would have found the final resting place that you and I make retirement plans for – they would have come Home. Yet some of them find, it wasn’t the ‘home’ they thought it would be.

So what is this elusive thing called Home?

As a civilisation we might have ceased being nomads long ago, but we are still urban wanderers. Sitting by our computers, shopping, eating, flicking channels, our minds are wandering to wishes and hopes and desires. We might have settled but our hearts haven’t. Our lives are too heavy for us to move them around, and we wait for and plan and dream of a tomorrow where we will reach just where we want to get, lighter, unburdened of today.

My friend M dreams of owning her own apartment, my friend J dreams of going back to Bangalore and living there. I dream of a house in the hills facing a lake. V, of a bed and breakfast somewhere in rural India.

Home, for a lot of us, is a sense of peace, of rest, of finally belonging perhaps, of being one with the self. But sometimes, even when we find that apartment or that house by the hills, it doesn’t seem like we’ve come home.

Perhaps the answer lies in what we call Home. Perhaps Home isn’t a place at all. Maybe it is more a feeling. Something that takes away the emptiness of being human.

So then what is home? Is it one thing? Is it lots of things? If it’s a feeling, what kind is it? Could a couch be home, a moment of glory or a cup of tea? A faded letter perhaps. An oft visited memory. A person. A song. A smell. What if any one of these could be Home, or even better, all of this could be Home?

My friend T’s daughter would stop crying if you played a Bollywood song for her and my friend R would carry his blanket everywhere. That was probably Home to them.

There’s a film of Susan Sarandon’s - ‘Anywhere but here’. It’s a great title and captures the essence of search - constantly restless, rushing about in a waiting room, watching life outside it with keen eyes. Perhaps all of us have a Home hidden someplace that we haven’t yet found because we are expecting something else.

For those of us still searching, the world is as alien inside, as it is out. For those of us who have found their Home, every place now seems, welcome.