What exactly is “home”?
I think what’s beautiful about the concept of home is that it means something a little bit different for everyone.
For some, home is permanent. It means comfort and constancy. It means pancakes for breakfast every Sunday and the place where the sun shines through your blinds and hits your bed just right in the morning. For others, home is variable. It means change and spontaneity. It means bouncing back and forth and juggling between the “todays” and “tomorrows”. And for still some others, home ceases to exist. Perhaps for those people, “home” is simply “now”.
I never used to think of school as home. I used to hear my friends call it “home” when I was a freshman, and I couldn’t help but think how utterly wrong that seemed. This isn’t home, I thought. Home is where your bed is always comfortable and you can go barefoot in the shower and your mom always finds that one missing sock that you lost three months ago. Those things don’t happen here. “Here” is “school”. And “school” is not “home”.
Every once in a while, the word would even slip out of my own mouth – just by accident – but it would make me feel uncomfortable every single time. This isn’t home, I would scold myself. Whatever you do, just don’t call it “home” when you’re on the phone with mom.
But I got lucky.
A little over a year passed, and suddenly, “school” and “home” weren’t so mutually exclusive anymore. I started learning things about my campus. I found my place, I found my people, and I found my passion. Suddenly, “school” was “home”. And somewhere along the way, getting a text from my mom that said, “You home?” didn’t make me cringe anymore.
1. You start to fall in love with every little thing about your campus.
The more people I watch hobble onto the bus to go to class every morning, the more it makes taking the long way home the absolute best part of my day. How lucky am I to live in a place where the people are always kind, the parks are always inviting, and the trees in the fall are always more vibrant than anywhere else in the world I’ve been?
2. You have a much smaller desire to leave.
Sometimes my thoughts manage to creep their way out of my own head and into broad daylight – right where I didn’t want them to be. Like when my friends tell me they’re going home for a weekend, and I can’t help but raise an eyebrow and blurt out, “Wait, why?” It’s okay to be in love with your real home. But it’s also okay to be so madly in love with your home away from home that you just don’t really want to leave.
3. Your real home becomes an even more precious gift.
And everything that comes with it does too. I never got quite as excited to see my cats when I came home from a 7-hour day in high school as I do when I come home from a 15-week semester at college. You know that saying that your parents always told you when you were little? The one that went something like, “Distance makes the heart grow fonder”? Distance is funny that way. But I think it means well.
I don’t want to get to the end of this life and realize that I put home in a box. I want home to be changing. I want it to keep me on my toes and to be a huge handful of puzzle pieces that would ruin the puzzle completely if they ever went missing. I want home to be a bold, stubborn imprint on my heart – an imprint that represents the memory of not just one place that tugged on my heart strings, but all the places that did.
You know what’s beautiful about home?
It doesn’t have to be stagnant, if we don’t let it.
