Dive deep into the profound concept of “home” and its significance in our lives. What does it really mean to have a place to call our own, and how does the idea of home resonate deep within our soul? With the current state of housing affordability, the dream of owning a home may seem unattainable. However, home is not always defined by its materiality or cost. It is a sanctuary we create, an emotional refuge that transcends the boundaries of brick and mortar, and in short, home is what we make it. It reflects our values, aspirations, and the essence of our being. Reevaluating what you think of home can have a profound impact on your spiritual well-being.
00:00 Intro 00:19 Where Do I Belong? 01:00 Conflicting Ideas About HOME 01:59 Priced Out 02:17 Nostalgia 03:06 Still The American Dream? 03:42 Restart 04:00 Different Homes 04:52 There’s No Place Like Your Home 05:42 You Have The Ability
Home.
Such a simple word, yet there’s so much meaning. When we say home, are we all thinking the same thing? When I say home, what do you think of?
A house, a city. I don’t believe that home is anything physical. Home doesn’t have to be where you live. Instead, it’s where you spend your time. Where is home?
Where do you belong? Have you ever felt trapped between two worlds trying to figure out where you belong? On one hand, you need a place to take care of your physical requirements for sleeping and eating and providing safety. I mean, it’s why birds have nests and rabbits have warrants. And Louis has your TV. He’s on your TV right now, isn’t he? Tough crowd. We also need a place for our things, a place to think and a place to search our soul. It is the union of these two needs that would create a place we would want to be. And we would call that place home. A realtor might call this a starter home. Mr. Beast, he would call it a home, but then he’d cut it in half.
Drop the meteor.
And a religion might call this place heaven. It’s hanging around. No matter what you call it, you need a home. The problem is most of us are carrying around two conflicting ideas of home, and it’s not helping any of us. Let me ask you this, were you ever a kid and did you live somewhere? Then you probably have very distinct memories tied to that address. I learned the word cacka right here. It’s a funny word, cacka. The point is, you have core memories tied to specific times and places, but you probably don’t live in any of those places now, and none of them are home anymore. Except what happened in those homes, from the tender to the traumatic, still informs your present idea of home. Right now, you have a home where you live, where your stuff lives, where you go home after a long day of whatever. That place may be great, or maybe just a step up from a cardboard box. But I honestly hope it’s better than that. There’s also a second home, the dream home. It’s not the place for your soul to rest, but it is the place you hope for.
The place that makes you think, if only I had it all. It holds all your material hopes and expectations informed by your childhood home, what it was like when life was better. This second home, the dream home, is what influences how we search for home and what we expect to find it, and how it will make everything different.
Except the the lack of affordable housing is a national problem, and right now it’s worse than ever.
More and more of us believe in the reality of that dream, less and less. There’s plenty that’s said about the factors causing these issues of home ownership, but I want to center on what you and I can change, and it’s tied to this. Nostalgia. You know, the times when everything made sense, the good old days, when all the details came together in a way that created a perfect moment, like how I used to think this was a good song. Where are you? But I know better now. It’s the best song. I’m so sorry. Nostalgia is the vehicle to bring us back to better times and can allow us to reexamine why these particular moments mean so much. The smell of grandma’s baking, the way mom walked when she was nervous before big events, the way dad told the same joke to put you at ease. These are the details of living, and they serve as hints towards what makes up the intangible needs. I might even call them spiritual needs. But these meaningful memories also get wrapped in all the products of the era. We remember the shoes, the retro games, the pants, colorways, and questionable hair of that specific era.
What we had convinced ourselves was dead is crawling back out of the shallow grave we dug for it now haunts us. Of course, this is the nature of trends coming and going. But there’s also a growing demand to remember something better because we’re having a hard time finding it in the here and now. We make it, reimagine it, repackage it, relive it. But I don’t know that we’re capturing what made nostalgia possible in the first place. But as for having a physical home, owning a home sits at the core of the American dream. It would be in these walls that you can have a family, have comfort, have modern amenities. A home is a realization of freedom. But what if you can barely afford your rent for that little one bedroom apartment on the south side? Does it mean you have no home? And if you don’t own a place to call home, can you ever really be home? But even if we could start over as a society, you would keep the very human desire for a home that provides safety and spiritual satisfaction. And in this yearning for the familiar, you would again be drawn to the first desires of home, which began for each of us in our childhood homes.
Caka. This homebound nostalgia is what pieces together the sights and smells and sounds of home. You ever wonder how different home can feel for others, particularly other children? In photographer James Mollison’s collection titled Where Children Sleep, we can see just how different home can be. It’s vast variety. It’s obvious inequality, it’s similarity and offering some form of rest. This is what Mollison had to say. A few years ago, a child’s charity asked me to come up with an idea for engaging with children’s rights. I found myself thinking about my bedroom, how significant it was during my childhood, and how it reflected what I had and who I was. It occurred to me that a way to address some of the complex situations and social issues affecting children would be to look at the bedrooms of children in all kinds of different circumstances. Each one of these children has a different idea of home, what it should look like, the food found there, the sound of it. And yet, so much is the same to our own childhood homes. The things we love, our prized possessions, a sense of safety and soulfulness. Really, there’s no place like home.
How do we find shelter and safety while also growing our soul? Here’s a couple ideas. First, ask yourself, what were the ingredients of previous homes that were meaningful to you? Did you feel safe asking questions? Were there expressions of love? Did people spend time together simply because they could? Heaven as a place can feel very far away, but the concepts of what constitutes heaven are very much within reach. A place of refuge, a place to be together with ones we love, a place that can be separate from the noise outside. And this is a reality you can work on now, today. Which brings me to my second idea. There’s no place like the home you make. Home is where each generation can choose what they pass on, what they improve upon, and what they move on from. Some of us will come from homes that had it all, and others will come from broken homes. But the promise of home is the opportunity to build what you wanted for yourself and those who come in it. Home is a singular unit that makes up a community which creates a city and ultimately a civilization. Home is where entire persons are formed, and we do not give ourselves enough credit in just how much power we have in that process.
While we might long for better days, we have the ability to create a new nostalgia created by us and felt by those who come into our home. Home is what you carry within. So let your home be what you make of it.
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dyejo
Guest Author
