"Home" again?
Ten days into my recent vacation, I caught myself saying "I'm going home on Sunday". I stopped. Home? Was I going "home" to Kabul?
Having lived and traveled in countries other than my own for the past few years, and having found a life partner with roots geographically far from mine, I have struggled with the concept of "home" for a while. (I wrote this column on the topic in 2002.) Is home where your family lives? Is it where you keep most of your things? Or is it where you happen to be living at the moment?
My family is divided between Sweden and Poland; my closest friends between Sweden and the US. Most of my stuff is in Washington DC, though my new KitchenAid Mixmaster and old college notebooks are housed in Los Angeles. And I live in Kabul. Where is home? I always used to say that home is wherever Oren and I are, together. But lately, I have come to suspect that the real answer is less rosy and romantic. By the time I arrived at Kabul International Airport yesterday, after 48 hours of plane-induced philosophizing, I had decided that Kabul is in fact not home.
Indeed, between vegan airplane lunches and mimosas in first-class lounges ("I live in Afghanistan" gets you far), I realized that home cannot signify a place where I cannot sit in a park or walk down the street by myself without fear. Despite the home-like feeling of friendships and everyday routines, home cannot be a place where I am advised to keep a grab-bag in case of emergency.
Deciding what is not home is far from determining what is home, I know. Perhaps the latter question simply does not need to be answered. Perhaps there is no answer.
Having lived and traveled in countries other than my own for the past few years, and having found a life partner with roots geographically far from mine, I have struggled with the concept of "home" for a while. (I wrote this column on the topic in 2002.) Is home where your family lives? Is it where you keep most of your things? Or is it where you happen to be living at the moment?
My family is divided between Sweden and Poland; my closest friends between Sweden and the US. Most of my stuff is in Washington DC, though my new KitchenAid Mixmaster and old college notebooks are housed in Los Angeles. And I live in Kabul. Where is home? I always used to say that home is wherever Oren and I are, together. But lately, I have come to suspect that the real answer is less rosy and romantic. By the time I arrived at Kabul International Airport yesterday, after 48 hours of plane-induced philosophizing, I had decided that Kabul is in fact not home.
Indeed, between vegan airplane lunches and mimosas in first-class lounges ("I live in Afghanistan" gets you far), I realized that home cannot signify a place where I cannot sit in a park or walk down the street by myself without fear. Despite the home-like feeling of friendships and everyday routines, home cannot be a place where I am advised to keep a grab-bag in case of emergency.
Deciding what is not home is far from determining what is home, I know. Perhaps the latter question simply does not need to be answered. Perhaps there is no answer.
posted by Anja at 1:28 PM
1 Comments:
“There is an old Tibetan saying: wherever you feel at home, you are at home. If your surroundings are pleasant, you are at home.”
The Dalai Lama
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