jeudi 5 juillet 2012

The Notion of Home


“The trouble with coming home is that you don’t expect it to be difficult at least not in the way you expected Mali, or Turkmenistan or Guatemala to be difficult. These were exotic ‘foreign’ places, after all, and the whole point about foreign is that it’s bound to take some adjustment.

But home is the antithesis of foreign, it’s the other extreme. Among other things, it represents the known, the familiar, the place where you know how to act. Surely no one needs to prepare you for diarrhea-proof ice cream, air-conditioned theaters, and the luxury of speaking English wherever you go. In short, whatever applies to foreign by definition does not apply to home.

This is all true except that in most sense of the word – including all those just mentioned above- the place you call home is now, in fact, a foreign country.

The problem, then has to do with this word ‘home’ and what it really means. In The Art of Coming Home, Craig Storti writes:

In the sense that home is the place where you were born and raised, where people speak your native language and behave more or less the way you do – what we might call your home land and your home culture- then it is indeed home that awaits you as you step off the jumbo jet. If you should happen to think of home only in this limited sense and expect nothing more of it,then the place you return to will not disappoint you.
But this is not what most people mean by home – which is where all the trouble starts. Most people use the word in a more profound sense, referring to a set of feelings and routines as much as to a particular place. In this formulation, home is the place where you are known and  trusted and where you know and trust others; where you are accepted, understood, indulged, and forgiven; a place of rituals and routine interactions; of entirely predictable events and people and very few surprises; the place where you belong and feel safe and secure and where you can accordingly trust your instincts, relax, and be yourself. It is, in short, the place where  you feel ‘at home.’
This is a much broader definition, of course, though much closer to what most people expect and require of home. Needless to say it is also a much higher standard by which to measure the place you have returned to – a standard, in fact, that any such place cannot possibly meet. As we will see, this very realization, that home is really not home, is at the core of the experience of reentry.

….. Of course, neither the place where you left off nor the person who went overseas exists anymore. Transitions, even when they’re expected, can be troublesome. When they’re not expected, they can be genuinely debilitating.”

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