For the past few weeks now I have been planning and packing for my yearlong volunteering trip around the world, and one question has been flittering in and out of my mind: what does it mean to have a home? Is home a physical place? A group of people? A sense of belonging? Or some other kind of feeling? This question arose naturally in the context of my upcoming adventure. I am someone who likes to be snuggled up and comfortable at home, and I have been somewhat worried that my long-term vagrancy will eat at me psychologically. Thus I have been interested in trying to find a sense of ‘home’ that does not preclude someone without a literal home.
Let’s start with the most obvious conception of home: is home a physical place? Maybe it is for some people, and I have often found a sense of home in my own personal space. Designing a space for myself that makes me happy has been essential for my wellbeing. We often talk about feeling ‘not at home’ in certain locations, like someone who doesn’t like cities living in one. So it seems there could be some element of physical location that factors into one’s home. But is this a strict condition? Does one’s sense of home require one to have a permanent abode? I certainly hope not, and as I will get to shortly, I suspect that this is not the case.
Then perhaps home is a group of people. For many extroverts this is obviously the case. And even for more introverted people, being alone and isolated– say on an extended solo trip– can intensify homesickness and make someone long for home, which seems to indicate that there is some element of people in the concept of having a home. But what about people who genuinely prefer to be alone? Could they then not have a home? Consideration of this point seems to imply that having a home does not strictly require one to have a collection of people.
So it seems neither a physical place nor a collection of people are strictly necessary to have a home, and these are arguably some of the most popular conceptions of what it means to have a home. But there is nonetheless something essential captured in these ideas. Because certain types of people find home in these places, there must be something to the idea.
Maybe we need a more abstract concept of home. Maybe home is purpose. Consider for instance a fulltime charity worker who finds immense fulfillment in their work, and this lends them a certain sense of home. If this person was forced to work in a soul crushing office job that did net bad for the world, then they would probably lament feeling ‘not at home,’ just as in our first example.
Now all three of the aforementioned concepts of home– place, people, and purpose– are examples of where someone can find ‘home.’ But what is it that all these concepts share that allow them to feel like some kind of home?
Home is belonging
My suspicion is that the broadest conception of home, and one that would appeal to an odd vagrant like myself, is as follows: home is a feeling of belonging– with heavy emphasis on the feeling. People who find home in a place feel a sense of belonging in their location. For instance, many people would kill to live in sunny San Diego, where I have spent my past four years. And true, there is a certain pleasure associated with constant sunshine and warmth. But I have grown incredibly homesick over the past couple of years, because I have felt that I don’t belong there. I belong in the woods, somewhere quaint and quiet, where streams bubble underneath the oak trees. I miss being somewhere I can take my dog swimming! I miss the green, I miss the soil between my toes, and– ah, enough romanticism, you understand the idea. I do not belong in San Diego.
It is quite obvious how people can likewise find a sense of belonging in relationships with other people. Being around people who do not understand you, and who you cannot understand, can make one feel alienated and awkward; it can make you feel not at home. And being around people who do understand you can make you feel like you do belong. Imagine the following metaphor: you wake up one day in Kazakhstan and suddenly everything is in Russian. The signs are in Russian. Everybody is speaking in Russian. You cannot understand anything and few people can understand you. That is going to make it feel like you don’t belong. In contrast, being around people who understand you will lend an automatic sense of belonging. Thus being around people who understand and especially like you can make you feel belonging, and therefore like you are home. You feel like you are a part of something– in this case, other people’s lives.
The idea that one can find belonging in purpose is certainly more abstract. This would probably be a broader sense of belonging focused on belonging in this world. Finding something to dedicate one’s existence towards would lend a sense of belonging in existence very generally. In contrast, not having any sense of purpose could make you feel alienated from existence itself. It could make you feel like you don’t belong in this world at all. Purpose seems very fundamental in this sense– but this is not to claim that purpose is necessary for having a home! I think aimlessly having the correct place or people in one’s life could result in having a home even if one is lacking in greater purpose. I could probably feel at home if you bought me a cabin deep in the woods by a lake, even if I did not have any real purpose. Nonetheless, I would suspect that having purpose is in some sense a stronger kind of home than merely having a place or people.
Also, a small aside. I do not think purpose needs to be ethically coded. We considered the charity worker’s purpose as the quintessential example, but I don’t think you need to be doing something good in order to find purpose. A morally bereft person who absolutely loves engineering and thinking could find great purpose in developing weapons that will be used to kill people. A morally bereft person who really enjoys words and thinking may find purpose using their intelligence to coordinate billion dollar transactions in corporate law. And as an example of something amoral (which is to say not good or bad), my Lab probably finds more purpose in swimming than any of us could ever hope to have.
To reiterate what we have expressed to this point. We have examined various perspectives on what it could mean to have a home, and we specifically looked at place, people, and purpose. After that we tried to understand what these could all have in common in relation to having a home, and it seems they are all concerned with a feeling of belonging. Thus we came to the tentative thought that home is at its core a feeling of belonging.
Home is something you can find on the road
Now I will turn the question towards my future: how can I cultivate a sense of home while I am away for a year? Obviously I will not have a permanent place, and although I will have transient people, it is unlikely that I will develop serious relationships. So what can I do to have a home? How can I cultivate a sense of belonging that is not dependent on where I am or who I am with?
As I stated in the outset, I am going to be volunteering everywhere I go on this trip around the world. I would be very surprised if volunteering in different communities does not lend me that more abstract sense of home or belonging that follows from purpose. In feeling that I am doing something positive for the world, I will feel some sense of belonging in existence itself– a belonging we identified as an abstract sense of home.
But home could be a lot more than that, too. For instance, one ‘place’ I can always go to find home is my favorite Scripps Institute of Oceanography sweatshirt with my favorite cozy sweatpants. Just the feeling of being all soft and warm and cozy in these clothes is sufficient to feel some sense of home.
Another important consideration is one’s hobbies, and perhaps this should have been considered in our original search for home. Hobbies could fall under purpose, but I largely think they are independent (consider that much art is done without purpose but solely for the sake of intrinsic inspiration). I will be writing everywhere I go, and that will lend me some sense of being at home. Writing is something that makes me feel belonging in the same way swimming makes my dog feel belonging; in both cases we are exercising what we were always meant to do. Likewise for music. All I am bringing on this trip are my backpack and my guitar, and if I had to lose one of these I would hope to lose the backpack! Joking, but only somewhat. Guitar is a big part of feeling at home for me, and this is an excellent sense of home for a vagrant. Too bad my eighty-eight key keyboard could not make the cut.
Ultimately, I’ll have to see if I really can find ‘home’ in this way during my trip. Maybe my best efforts will fail me and I’ll want to come home in just a few short weeks. I certainly don’t know what my future holds, but I do know one thing– that I hope to find home whatever way I can.