This past weekend, I went home and was able to spend time with my friends and family. Over the weekend, I also visited my first high school, a place near and dear to my heart. Being back in New York since transitioning to college has caused me to reflect on the concept of home in general and what it means to have a home. Can we find home in multiple places? What constitutes a home?
When my first high school closed in my sophomore year, I remember the internal conflict I had in still regarding that place as my home. My two years at Good Counsel Academy, with its open campus, cherry blossom trees and loving community, established it as my second home.
After it closed, I didn't know what to do with myself. I felt I had no right to still call that place my home. How could I, when the school was no longer in existence? I struggled with wanting so badly to call a place home that I felt was no longer mine. The closing of Good Counsel was the first time I realized that home is so much more than a place.
Greater than that, home is a feeling, a state of being.
Of course, there's no place like physically being home. When I walk into my house in New York and find its familiar surroundings, my mother's decorative angels and dad's printed out inspirational quotes lining the walls, I instantly feel at ease. Still, simply being with my mother, father, or brothers, is all I need to spur this feeling of home. The members of my family are what I associate with home, and no matter where we are, who I am with them is my state of being at home.
I think people often talk about their "homes" in an idealistic manner. And yes, all of the homes I've encountered in my life have so many wonderful things associated with them.
Still, I think it's important to remember that a home does not have to be perfect in order for it to be considered one.
For me, I always associate home with a certain comfortability. When and where one feels most comfortable, means that one's flaws may come out in these places, aspects of one's personality that one is not most proud of. But to me, that is what makes home most beautiful.
If home is where you are most yourself, then wherever your home is, is a place that accepts you for all you are.
I am lucky to have found home in multiple places, people, and events: my house in NY, the beach on the North Fork, both of my high schools, and now Villanova. The capacity to find home on one's many paths of life is something that I think, speaks to human's ability to adapt and take advantage of every opportunity that comes their way.
Something I'm coming to realize recently, is that if home is a feeling, then really, we have the ability to create our homes anywhere, at any time.
Really, home being a state of being establishes it as a connection with oneself.
Think about it. I've already said that home is a feeling, that it is where we are most ourselves- isn't this made possible when we are connected with ourselves? More than ever, I am seeing the importance of finding home within ourselves, first. Just as self-love is crucial to enabling love for others, finding a home and a certain comfortability with ourselves first is crucial to finding a home with other people, and in other places or things.
No matter where I am or where I have gone, I will always hold in my heart the multiple homes I have encountered throughout my life, and use all I have learned as a means of continuing to shape the person I am. I would not be the "confident women, compassionate leader" I strive to be, without attending Good Counsel, nor would I have a witty sense of humor without being consistently surrounded by my mother and brother.
And so I urge you, readers, to strive to find the feeling of home wherever you go, because ultimately, this sense of comfortability is what matters most.
Once you are at home with yourself, your capacity to create homes everywhere will emerge, and to me, this is one of humans' greatest powers.
Talk soon,
Sam