Finding home is a resolute, hard-earned struggle, but as near as one’s fondest recollection.
We go through life in an endless search. As babes swallowing cauldron-brewed ambition, jaws gaping greedily as we launch into a lifelong, solitary trek towards -- something. We meet many people along life’s highway. What is our first question? The query with which we will lay the foundation of a relationship? Is it not, “Where are you from?”
What is this obsession we have with the discovery of origins? An attempt to glimpse fragments of a past, one so telling about the present, future, and beyond? For one shining moment we catch sight of home; maybe not ours, but a home. A home that means something to another human being, an idea we conjure up in our mind’s eye and sink softly into reminiscence of our own place of peace.
We are, first and foremost, homegrown -- molded by people who have loved us and continue to love us, an archive physically anchored in our cerebrum by multicolored sound bites and film clips our memory houses. But maybe home cannot be likened to such idealism. It may sealed, ironclad and compartmentalized like an airtight alibi, serving as a reference point for where we have been in relation to the now. It is what the state of becoming intends. It is where we long to be.
Noam Chomsky’s universal grammar theory posits that humanity’s ability to learn language is naturally embedded in our brains, imprinted upon by the kisses of language gods. In this spirit, couldn’t one argue that our potential to connect with one another -- to love, to empathize, to understand -- is manifested in our common, universal conception of home? The subconscious safeguards this pooled desire, resurfacing the longing at times when our charter has gone off course or is waylaid by angry tempests.
While the now pressures us, the past haunts or pinch us with nostalgia, the concept of home lingers faithfully beneath our psyches like Argos tirelessly awaited the return of Odysseus. Although it may seem that our human nature creates a corrupted dichotomy, one which forces our raging souls to be at odds at all times, our magnetic intuition steadies the course.
