Stranger at home

Stranger at home is someone who feels at home -mentally- homeless. This is especially applicable for emigrants, migrants, nomads, travellers, wanderers, and those who think they are lost. Let me introduce you further this concept of home-feel emptiness into the ambience of our commonly formidable daily experiences. Following our first class privilege to move freely across nations and natural boundaries, we attempt to give further meaning to our starving lives, and take our souls to distant kingdoms where to shelter spare pieces of our hope during the stormy seasons. 

We move forward, discover new sceneries, cultures, and more importantly, we enrich our lives by sharing it with other beings, human and non-human. Yet we still may miss an important piece of the puzzle that throws a giant shadow onto our backpack of aimless expectations. This is particularly evident when it comes to talking about home. Many of us -human survivors- ignite their memories where all was well and we cherish those moments of infancy and carelessness with a great dose of unattainable pleasure. Since we grow up, inevitably, we get older and decide to build chic nests where to feel safe and protected. 

But the question arises when we have our fist cup of tea of the day in the kitchen with views towards the distant world.  As Woody Allen once stated: “When I am in New York, I want to be in Europe. And when I am in Europe, I want to be in New York.” I call this “the syndrome of imaginary home”, which in other words means struggling to deeply connect with the place you are at the moment. And no matter how many parties you assist to, how many new people you meet with, jobs you change, you might still not possess a true bound with the place where you live right now. Many clichés say that home is where your loved ones are (probably written by people who lead the same lives in the same places). Surely plausible statement but let's give it some credit. The thing is that it overlooks a tiny detail that when we “travellers/emigrants/adventurers/nomads/...” go home, many of us don’t even feel home at those places with those people anymore. So where is home then?

Furthermore, we certainly start to doubt about our ability and the attainability to feel home, and sometimes it can even taste as a second price for those who abandoned their safe places. If this is something that has been bothering you for more than twice a week, and you have found yourself unable to feel home anywhere you are, it could be possibly because you are not establishing a meaningful connection with the place where your soul is present right now. This non-material and non-people connection can solve something that none of the mortgage and social networking can do. Indeed, it’s much easier than building bricks and placing fancy furniture into the right corner or inviting friends over dinner. The thing is, would you stop one of the most ambivalent mental processes of feeling stranger at home and instead connect with those invisible roots that are crossing all the places around the world?

-jkn

P.S. You're home.