Searching For Home
Is it safe for us to get attached to a certain place or person and call it our home in a world when everything around us can crumble and collapse at any moment? The reasons that may take away a place we call “home” may be man-made, like the gruesome war, which has been tearing Syrian communities apart for more than eight years now, forcing people to escape into the unknown after witnessing everything they have ever loved getting wiped away within seconds. Other reasons can be naturally-caused, like the evil November 2018 fires that ate many celebrities’ mansions in Beverley Hills, who expressed in social media how devastated they were to lose their homes, but still grateful to be healthy and with their loved ones.
The idea of home has been a topic of discussion since the beginning of time. The mere pronunciation of the word ‘home’ gives its listener a heartwarming feeling that makes them more and more curious to find its origins and discover what created the idea of home in our lives and deep in our own thoughts and hearts. Throughout my childhood and teenage years, I did not have the opportunity to travel away from home, so it was something I was dying to do. At seventeen, I had the honor of representing Lebanon at a global forum for Microsoft in Seattle, Washington. It was a crazy week of being literally on the other side of the world from my country. Days after I returned, and my jet lag had worn off, I remember laying one day in my room next to my beloved big window which faces the main street. Along with the golden color of sunset, the familiar sound of the Beirut traffic merged with the sound of birds flying around the city reminded me of the countless evenings I spent that same place and time of day for many years before. Since I had landed at the airport, it was the first time that I truly felt that I was back home.
What about the people who get to travel more often and seem to have the perfect life on social media? One of those lucky few says that on his travels, even when he was enjoying his time and company, the feeling of homesickness would still find a way to creep inside of him, without him being able to define exactly what he missed about Lebanon. In her book, ‘All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes’, Maya Angelou wrote: “The ache for home lives in all of us; the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.” Home is associated with the feelings of stability and the freedom we have to be who we are in a place we are perfectly oriented around. Yet, the concept of home is more complex than we may think. Other people have told me that they felt at home many times whilst being in foreign countries.
Curious about what my Lebanese friends and colleagues believe home is, I asked over a hundred people aged between nineteen and twenty-six the following question: “How do you define home?” My choice of people also included a small group from different nationalities, so I could compare the answers I get. The sample of international acquaintances included people from Egypt, Italy, India, United Kingdom, and other countries. Surprisingly, the nature of answers between the Lebanese people and my international sample did not vary at all. Only two people defined ‘home’ as the actual house they lived in, the majority defined home as the feeling of safety, warmth, comfort, and stability. Some concluded their answer by mentioning one person: their mother — or the feeling they get when locked in a tight hug with her. Others described ‘home’ as the place they can eat, sleep, relax and simply ‘recharge’ before heading back to fight their educational or work battles.
Most of these people identify themselves as Arab or Middle Eastern, like me. The way we are brought up is that we grow up in a house with a family until it’s time to attend university. Moving out at eighteen just for the sake of leaving home does not usually happen. Usually, somebody moves out to rent a dormitory or an apartment with friends if their college campuses are too far to commute for daily. After graduation, these students are expected to return to their families’ houses and only leave if they get married, complete further studies again far away from home, or work abroad. This lifestyle creates a generation with a mentality that is rooted and attached to its hometown and family, thus believing that mothers are the purest definition of home and associating ‘home’ with the positive emotions linked to motherhood such as love, care, security, and warmth.
If it’s human nature to want to belong to a certain place, but at the same time desire to explore beyond where we reside, what makes people define ‘home’ differently? The American playwright, performer, and activist Eve Ensler once said in her TED talk “Security and Insecurity”: “We are all essentially permanently displaced people. All of us are refugees. We come from somewhere and we are hopefully traveling all the time, moving towards a new place.” The human need to explore has led ancient voyagers like the Phoenicians to sail and interact with other great civilizations. This desire to explore has driven scientists to spend years exploring space and discovering the great planets and galaxies that lie beyond our Earth. It is that same need that motivates us to travel as far as we can get to discover parts of the world and ourselves.
One answer that stood out for me amongst the many that I received was from my friend Mounira, who said:” For me, home is a choice. Some people settle for a place because of the community, weather, money, or architecture. I don’t like to settle anywhere. It’s a choice for me to make every place a home. That is why I like to live in different places and make them all my home.” How can we transform a new place in our home? Our perception of what a home does this — coming from our earliest memories of security, grief, joy, and achievement in certain places. Events, big or small, happen to us in any number of places — an apartment or a mansion or a school or a university campus, with the faces of people that we adore. These events become a part of our individuality. We consciously or unconsciously exchange what we live to experience and learn with new places and people and whether we realize it or not, we give a part of ourselves to them and we grow to love them. With time, these events begin to define what we call ‘home’. These places and people turn into new safe places for us, one of our comfort zones. Every day, we are bombarded with online quotations that motivate us to live outside our comfort zones and throw ourselves out there, but returning to our comfort zone from time to time is necessary for our peace of mind.
The comfort of home, whatever or whoever we believe it is, and the love for exploration and travel are two conflicting urges that we have to learn to live with. Fulfilling each one of these needs as much as possible in harmony with how our lives unfold over time is a human requirement. After all, this world is made for us to explore. There are people who we are meant to meet and love that are still strangers to us at the moment. There are cities and towns with streets that look forward to our footsteps. I came to believe that as a future architect, one of our jobs to do, or maybe one of our most important job, is to create places where people can feel secure, meet great people, create unforgettable memories, but eventually leave and move on to other places hoping to create similar and hopefully better experiences. And in the end, how lucky would we feel if we were able to look back one day and be able to say that we have made many places home for our souls.
