When I was writing my own thoughts about home, I came up with a few ideas that stuck with me through my entry.
I started by thinking of ‘place’ as an environment and the expected things that fill that environment. So for myself growing up in a suburb, that place was an environment filled with winding streets, residences, corner stores, and friends.
I thought of space, as the specific things that I remembered in that environment, and how those specific things changed in time. In my own suburb, where the place was filled with residences that you would expect to see in a neighbourhood, the space had memories of friends’ houses, and how after all these years those houses are not my friends’ anymore.
I thought about home as being a place that was safe to explore, secure enough to be myself, and grounded enough that I could rest at the end of the day.
Peers’ thoughts
The following are a list of themes discussed in my peers blog posts on the same topic:
- Unique Space
- Land
- Independence
- Freedom
- Joy and Happiness and Love and Pride
- Memories
- Hope, Future
- Security, Care
- Family
- Community
- Belonging
- Making Connections
- Shared Experience and History
- Knowledge
- Learning
This list far exceeds the ideas that I discussed in my own post. When reading my peers’ blogs, I was astounded to find how people managed to articulate my exact thoughts about home, while approaching it in an entirely different way. I had considered ideas of space, freedom, security and adventure in my own description, and yet all of these other ideas of family, community, and belong; of shared experience and memories — none of them seem at all different to how I would want my feelings of home articulated, and yet were left out in my own post.
I have broken down my thoughts into general themes below, with a conclusion that wraps up these ideas at the bottom. There simply was a lot to unpack in my peers’ work, and I wanted to make sure their writings were done justice.
Unique Space and Land
I had considered the idea of place and space as being essential to our ideas of home, but I hadn’t considered how the uniqueness of that space would be essential. Holly, Victoria, Laura, Grace, and Magda all spoke about home involving a unique space that we can get to know personally. Laura, Magda, and Grace all spoke about the importance of land and nature in the places that we call home, and how they influence our feelings towards them. Grace specifically having the experience of growing up on an island, finds the idea of land not connected to the ocean as being unsettling and I have to say that, having grown up on the coast and always being near a beach or a river, I have to agree.
Holly and Victoria Specifically came across the ideas of seeing your home as space that is created by our living there. In Victoria’s story, she describes how a feeling of home starts to take shape from just the few days spent in an empty apartment. These “hints of home” coming in the forms of abandoned coffee and yet to be washed dishes, and framed pictures already starting to be hung on the walls. In Holly’s, the deep understanding of your space as how the layout reflects your experience.
Powerful Emotions
In general, we often have positive feelings of home. I was specific in my own entry to not declare that everyone’s experience of home is positive, but in our posts, it seems that many have those positive feelings of home. Presumably, when we do not feel these positive associations, we try to find other places to call home as we grow.
Magda, Holly, and Cayla had all uncovered powerful emotions that represent home in their blog entries. Magda had discussed the ideas of hope and future prospects as being something that fills the space and feeling of home. Both Magda and Cayla had added on with positive associations we have with home; feelings of Joy and Happiness and Love. Cayla talked about finding ways to stay entertained, engaged, and connected to the world. I suppose this is why I had brought in my memories of long bikerides as a kid. For me, it was a great way to pass time and feel connected to the space that surrounded me.
And Holly and Cayla both discussed how home is a place where we don’t just make memories, we take the time to make memories. When we feel at home, we create experiences that we can look back on when thinking of our past.
Security, Community, and Belonging
Ultimately I refer to home most often in terms of my ‘home base’. I think of home in my day-to-day as the place where I can relax and turn off for a bit. Magda, Cayla, Victoria, and Laura also saw ‘home’ as a place where we can feel this sense of security. A place to relax, find peace of mind, and to wind down. Victoria, Laura, and Magda all talk about how attached the feelings of family and community are to the feeling of home, with Magda describing community in terms of a group that provides freedom, play, and support. Finally Laura, added the feeling of belonging to this idea of community, security and family. And I have thought of this belonging throughout my life — from experiences in school and in university; in my professional life; and in my personal life. We feel at home when we think of our space as being a place that we belong. From the activities we do and the entertainment we seek we are in search of a sense of belonging connected to our feeling of home.
Connections and Experience
When I was describing my feeling of home, I was very focussed on the idea of home as a noun. ‘Home’ is a place that we experience, and I wanted to describe that experience as best as I could. I had not, however, considered thinking of home a verb, or as a thing that we are in an active roll of doing and creating. Magda discusses how we don’t just find ourselves in a community, we build ourselves into that community. From the early ages of preschool and before, we are making connections to those around us in order to form that community. These connections give us that same sense of belonging, and help us navigate the spaces that we include in our ideas of home.
But we don’t just make these connections in the young ages of 3 and 4. We are making these connections throughout our lives, identifying with those who can share in our experiences of the world, and who come from a shared history. Holly and Laura both describe this idea of shared experience in our ideas of home, that communities that we make our homes alongside share in the mutual feeling of belonging through their shared experiences and cultural contexts.
Knowledge and Learning
Throughout these entries is the feeling that home isn’t just about memories, or about our feelings of community and belonging. They come back to that idea of our space being unique, and our knowledge of how it unique. Our knowledge comes in many forms. As Cayla describes, it may be a space where learning happens, or may be a place where we know the resources around us. To Laura, it may be the knowledge of the space, its history, its meaning, and its context. To Grace, telling the story of the settlers who colonized her island as their home this knowledge may be in the form of stories told about the land that we live on.
Conclusion — TL;DR
I was amazed at how widely we think about home, and how so many people consider such similar ideas, and such drastically different ideas. For instance, it seems that we all agreed that security and rest are an important part of what we find in a home. We all considered how home is contained in a physical space, but also an emotional space, and that we have complex ways of navigating these feelings. We all seemed to consider that home changes over time in various ways. Home, as a child is different to home as an adult.
But many had some really unique ideas that don’t seem to contradict our ideas of home. Home having a specific connect to story was an interesting thing to read from Grace, who had a unique understanding of the place that she grew up.
Home being a place where we learn and understand responsibility in different stages of life was an idea of Cayla’s that was profound and eye-opening, but still somehow felt fundamentally true.
Victoria and Holly both came to the conclusion of home involving a specific understanding of how a space is unique to us, and I have not been able to get this idea out of my head since.
And Laura thought about how home exists in your sense belonging to a group, to a space, to an experience. And this, too, seems essential to how I think about home, but had not considered before now.
I’ve learned a lot in this assignment about how our ideas about home all cover very similar ground, while taking many different paths across it. Some experience home in how they connect to others, how they think about the land, or how they remember their past. But each of these seem to just be a perspective with which we can regard a generally understandable space.