Home

Home: the place where one lives permanently, especially as a member of a family or household.
- Oxford Dictionary

No one lives anywhere permanently. There is always moving houses, and death. Besides, the place you live in change too. You can say no one has a home. But this definition has no use besides fatalistic musings. Clearly, by “permanently”, we mean an extended period of time.

How long is this period of time? Does a place suddenly becomes a home when a bell rings, and confetti rains down? Clearly not. Is home a spectrum then?

Is a year long enough? Four years? I will most likely live here for the next four years, although one way or another, I wish it’s less.

Family: a group of one or more parents and their children living together as a unit. 	
- Oxford Dictionary

No one here is my parent, although last night, in my drunkenness, I called O my mother. If this is the definition of family, and family is a necessary condition for home, then this is not my home. But family is not necessary. Besides, we use metaphorical meanings for home and family all the time.

What will you do after you get home?
- C

Home is the place you live. A place where you can be safe from weather and crime and social interactions, if you want to. It is your default location. Everywhere else is relative to home.

Some attributes make a place homelier than others. Owning furnitures, for example. C has a slanted desk. I have a bean bag and a shoe rack. Taking roots, one might say. The idea is that they both make it harder to leave a place. Hence permanence.

Some people don’t feel safe at home, not from social interactions with family members. Is it still home? Does home have to be a good place?

Do you miss home?
- S

Home is a place you miss when you leave it behind. Once again, home is connotated positively. It has a desirable essence that is lacking everywhere else. Security? Social bonds? Love?

I felt such a satisfying tenderness today, walking by the lawn under an umbrella in a light drizzle. It reminded me of a family trip to Hamilton. I don’t remember the details, but I remember (imagine?) being young and walking between my parents.

I don’t want to go home. I am having more fun here than I would be back home. But I often long to go back to my childhood, when my goals and paths to achieve them were simpler.

Maybe home is an event. It has a time axis in addition to three space axis. In this case, you can never go back home, because you can only travel in one direction along the time axis. You must constantly create a new home out of your surroundings.

I long for the two camps I went to, although I know I am romanticizing them. Sometimes I think of them as my home. What was their essence? The people? Half of them went to MIT. That would make MIT my home. But I don’t live there. I will never live there. Even if I do a master’s there, the event would have passed. In my most sentimental moments, I compare rejection to being trapped on an island, unable to go home. That would make me Odysseus, but I am probably exaggerating.

Can you miss a home you have never been to?

Maybe one of the essence of the camps was their transcience. It made us cherish our time more. It insulated me from things I didn’t want to worry about. It’s not that I didn’t worry about things. I often felt challenged to understand a class or to prove my worthiness. I often pondered over X-risks and human flourishing. But worrying about these things felt good, unlike worrying about the margin size of my resume.