Maybe We’re All A Little Homesick Sometimes

When you’re safe at home you wish you were having an adventure; when you’re having an adventure you wish you were safe at home.

~ Thornton Wilder

Today, for the first time, after about 7 weeks of minor euphoria – I felt homesick.

I’ve missed my family before now, in a vague kind of way. But today I didn’t just miss my mum, I also missed the 6 o’clock news on TV3 and Wellington Harbour and TradeMe and driving my car around the bays and Lyall Bay at sunset and Wine Wednesday.

It was always going to happen of course. It was to be expected, and yet it came on unexpectedly. In a moment of tiredness, tinged slightly with loneliness. Which lead me to thinking…

I looked up the definition of “home” on Google. One which I particularly liked was “an environment offering affection and security”. Which made me think – maybe all homesickness is really just a longing for affection and security. And if that is the case, would going home really solve it? Is the place we’ve always called home really the thing we’re looking for when we feel homesick? Would being at home really fill that little gap inside us which, when we’re overseas, we define as the lack of home?

Maybe what travellers call “homesickness” is actually a feeling that we experience at home too – it’s just that at home we don’t have a handy label to put to it – “homesick” – or a logical and seemingly easy solution – “go home”. When we are at home, we just feel a vague yearning, an undefined sense of dissatisfaction, unease, a sense of something being missing that we can’t quite define. We feel it when we’re overseas and suddenly we can name it, we can place it in a box, and somehow the thought that there is a solution, even if we aren’t going to take it, makes it seem manageable and logical. “I’m feeling like this because I miss home, I could fix it by going home, but I don’t want to do that, so I will just ride the feeling out and it will all be ok”. We feel in control, the feeling makes sense within our current framework.

Home is not where you live, but where they understand you.

~ Christian Morganstern

When we’re overseas and can call it “homesickness”, we don’t have to face the reality of what the feeling really is, what it is really made up of. It’s a longing for familiarity, yes. But why do we long for familiarity? Because it feels secure. It feels safe. Homesickness is just that tug you feel when you are longing for affection and security – when you are longing to be understood. As such, maybe homesickness isn’t a sensation felt only by those who are away from what they call “home”, but rather an expression of the human condition, a feeling familiar to all – just that fundamental desire to be seen and loved for who you are – to be safe and loved.

Where we love is home,

Home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.

~Oliver Wendell Holmes

I’m the kind of person who feels filled with an inextinguishable love, an ability to find something to love in any place and any situation, a heart that overflows with a feeling of love for life and everything in it. I believe that happiness is a choice, and it’s one I strive to make every day. I believe that life is amazing, and it’s up to us to find the amazing wherever we happen to be. If where we love is home, then I am always home, I will always carry home with me, because I can always love.

Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.

~ Matsuo Basho

I somewhat cured my homesickness by going to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square and looking at much art goodness, including the original Sunflowers by van Gogh (such a simple painting, yet filled with such a direct, no-nonsense sense of practical optimism) and also including a 1871 painting by Monet of the exact scene I see every day when I walk over the bridge. And then I walked home over that very bridge and saw the modern version of the scene with my house behind it and thought: I am so lucky, I am the luckiest person in the world.

And the feeling hadn’t really gone, the “homesickness” feeling – which perhaps really is just the feeling of longing to be cared for, safe and understood. It was still there, but it was mingled in with the feeling of being blessed, the surrealness of the fact that I am alive and I am living in this amazing city, and the fundamental love that beats in my chest and will be there no matter where I go.

I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.

~ Maya Angelou

View over the Thames on my way home from work about 5 am one morning. Lucky biartch!

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