Coming home means being everywhere
Home and House. Coming home means being everywhere?
The British have been able to pay particular attention to the nuance between home and home.
I have always found the semantic difference between these two terms, only apparently similar, to be extremely refined, and I think it is a very interesting topic to analyze in a travel blog.
Reading between the lines, we discover how they can encompass two profoundly different concepts.
The word house indicates the house as a building, home, “residence”. An aseptic definition to define something tangible that serves to locate us and make us reachable.
The word home, on the other hand, is a completely different story: it indicates the place where loved ones reside, those that make you feel at home.
Various automatisms can lead us to think that home is and must continue to be the geographical place where we were born and probably grew up, almost without choice.
“But where is the house?”
Instead we can feel where home is, we can be at home anywhere.
For me, my home has not been – only – Rome for some time. Home is not only where we prepare coffee in the morning but also how we prepare it or the people with whom we choose to drink it, still steaming.
Home is the emotions that a place arouses in us, the memories we attach to an instant or a smile that doesn’t need a roof to make us feel safe and happy.
It is a state of mind that does not need airspace, address and house number.
Once again, where the barriers and geographical borders have been overcome, I find myself thinking how it is more difficult to cross a mental limit, intrinsic in the words that want us to be static and rooted in a sense that is now outdated.
Being in one place is different from being in one place, think about how decisive the definitions and words we use can be.
They bind us to physical dimensions, to ancient thoughts that have the smell of guilt and sometimes useless objects and which, therefore, are an obstacle to our personal change.
A change of perspective
The revolution we must carry out is above all human,
And it teaches us that the transformation is unstoppable, that we will find HOME when we have accepted it, when we have expanded the concept of space-time dimension and welcomed the flow of events and emotions.
It will be then that we will breathe the scent of madeleines in various places.
In the hotel where we often stay, in our favorite restaurant, in the metropolitan kaleidoscope of a stopover, in the streets of a new city.
On the beach where we breathed a deep sense of peace and tranquility or in the park where we took that photo we like so much.
Trust your feelings, you can find a home even in the most remote places on Earth, with the people who matter or with the right mental attitude.
Just search through the nuances of that term.
Four letters that do not necessarily contain a “physical” and geometrically determined dimension.
But they can slip through our fingers, unfold and disperse wherever we can establish a deep connection.
For those who, like me, travel a lot, the expression “I’m going home” remains too narrow, like a sweater that we can no longer wear because, by now, we have grown up and the experiences we have lived have changed us.
Home is also looking in the mirror and smiling, because we like what we see.
Over to Proust…
Marcel Proust, in his Recherche, wrote:
It is enough that a noise, a smell, already heard or breathed in the past, be it again, in the past and together in the present, real without being current, ideal without being abstract, for the permanent and usually hidden essence of things to be immediately liberated, and our true selves which, sometimes for a long time, seemed dead, even if it was not yet completely dead, awakens, animates receiving the celestial nourishment that is thus brought to it.
We are citizens of the world, beings with conscience and the wonderful ability to feel emotions and sensations.
Choose not where home is but what you want it to mean for you and have the courage to reach it, to follow it, to feel it, wherever it is.
