Where is home? Home is where the heart is. That is what they say isn't it?
It is a question I've been asked quite a bit over the years. Mainly due to the fact that i've been constantly traveling. These past few years i've traversed the world. There were periods where I hadn't stayed in a single place for more than a month - and have been doing so for months on end since 2021 (until recently).
London. Cascais. Lisbon. Madrid. Barcelona. New York. Tuscon. Los Angeles. San Francisco. Miami. Montreal. Comporta. Mykonos. Seville. Dubai. Colombo. Spetses. Kuala Lumpur. Berlin. Singapore. Phuket. Hong Kong. Riyadh. Mecca. Medina. Zurich. Klosters. Davos.
I wish I catalogued more about these trips. But I haven't.
Funny enough, I've always been leaving home. So much so that even in my attempt to write about home - I've ended up listing all the places i've left to. The cities that i've sought some sort of experience to reinvent myself. Now of course, that wasn't necessarily the objective of each trip. Every city had a purpose: a wedding, a meeting, a conference, an interest, a friend - but often times, people might say: couldn't those things have been discovered closer to home? Maybe.
During the holidays, a lot of us go to this so called home. We go back to spend time with family. To celebrate the new year to come, and the year that has just passed, with all its ups and downs + dreams and nightmares. And as we celebrate the turn of the century or a new millennium, we are taking part in something that is inherently human:
Moving forward. Growing up. Changing. Becoming the next best (ideally) version of ourselves.
At the same time, many of us go back in time, we go back home - and are transported to a previous reality, as if suddenly pushed into a space time continuum that recreates the world we once knew. So how are we supposed to move on when confronted with all the elements that we once felt the need to shed in order to usher ourselves into that next sense of self?
I had a conversation with a close friend the other day about what it means to be home. To stay home. To leave home. To come back home. Home is the center. It is the nest. The initial point of conception and perception. Conception being the birth, the coming to life and existence. Perception is the enlivening of the senses, the intake of all encompassing information - sights, sounds, smells, and politics.
I explained to my friend my theory on home being the center. It is simaltaneously the foundation for who you are, the launchpad for who you are to become, and the shackling guardrails for how you imagine yourself and your future.
We chatted about how necessary it was to leave home to grow. What it meant go to college and taste independence. To isolate ourselves from the past that shaped our minds. To experience the opportunity to build a new system of thought on our own accord. To be independent of the circumstances that were beyond our choice - where we were born and grew up, who our parents are, etc. Leaving home is to be suspended in-between, to be released from the powers that be. It is the period of young adulthood that marks the beginning of sovereign exposure. Detaching yourself from home, even momentarily, opens the space to explore an alternate worldview of what is possible.
Coming back home this time around, I've realized that isolation period is over. There comes a point when you realize that - as Derrida says: "the center, is not the center" and as such, home is no longer home. It is and it isn't. Home is no longer what defines the rest of the world, but it is a culmination of memories and ideas that will inevitably be a part of you and push you toward solving the puzzle you are destined to put together.
Especially if you are ambitious about niche things - either within the arts, technology, or politics - unless your passion is in your blood and familiar to your origins, aligning with your calling requires a seminal break from home. But I think as you get closer to more substantial success regarding your purpose, rather than viewing home as disjointed from your vocation, it becomes more apparent that this center, wherever it may be or how incompatible it is with your desired life goal - it is in fact the absolutely inseparable secret ingredient to realizing the geometry of your life.
You can only connect the dots looking backwards…
Happy holidays :)