Topic 3: Home - Jaehyeong Lee

Once upon a time, I thought home was a place where I'd grown up and lived a great deal of my life in.

This place was the magical land of Rancho Palos Verdes near Torrence in Southern California.

Kinda far away from the land of my culture, South Korea, but after living for about 7 years, I ended up there. I would spend four years of my life there, the longest I had ever settled down to live in one place. My dad had a relatively stable job that allowed him to stay while he waited for his permanent residence application to pass through so he could improve his, my mother's, and my, career paths.  I didn't realize how much staying in one place for so long could change the way I felt about a place, or how much it would affect the way I felt about the people there or the culture around me. Here are a couple things that changed.

1. I made friends and stayed with them long enough to like them, hate them, and then love them.

2. I got attached to my former place of residence.

3. I met someone I would have a relationship with for 7 years afterwards.

Because I got to feel those things, my definition of home changed in a very drastic way. I'll explain how they changed me.

1. Years after I moved away from sunny California to the land of rain, water-air and tree, NC, I realized how much I missed my friends. I missed them so much that I was depressed about being friendless in NC, that I wouldn't see my friends the next day. I missed my friends so much that I didn't make any friends for the first few months in NC. I didn't want to make any new friends. Depressed, lonely and destitute, I began my angsty middle school years missing home, which I mistakenly thought was California.

California wasn't my home, friends. California just happened to be the place where my close friends were.

2. I really missed the old place. Its compact walls, its white-walled apartment feeling, its flat roof, its stone staircase (not part of the apartment, just the access stairs). I missed it so much that I actually scootered my way to it when I visited my best friend, Nick, the last time I went to visit him and other friends. I scootered miles. MILES. ON A SCOOTER.

Trust me. You haven't lived until you've ridden a scooter going 25 mph on bricks with rounded edges that tried to bump you off and signs hip high that you had to duck under to avoid getting blown off of your scooter.

No helmets, no pads. I felt like such a badass.

Anyway, getting back to the main point! When I saw the apartment again, I couldn't believe it. It was so much smaller than I had thought it was when I was little. It started a chain in me from that point on to try to revisit every part of my past physically, from Santa Barbara to Long Island to all of the cities we lived in in Korea. Now that I have the ability to hold memories in my conscious, I will be able to revisit them for the rest of my life. I finished, for the most part, what I started, the revisiting of old places of my youth, and I now look onwards, having changed my final, now current, definition of home.

The journey to physical locations helped me in my realization about the true meaning of home. We're almost there, folks.

3. This girl was my first love. She helped shape me into the person I am today. This person also solidified the definition of what my home was. When we decided to split, the entirety of Rancho Palos Verdes, a place I drilled into my mind as home for 11 long years, looked completely foreign to me.

I was a complete stranger in my own "home".

That's when it hit me, as I walked down the sunset lit hill I remember, shining so beautifully. Home is not a physical place.

Home is where the people you love are. My home is in my beloved friends, in my family, in my current beau. Home can be experienced through the senses, but it resides where one cannot ever physically enter. It's in another person's love for you.

That's not to say a roof above your head is not necessary. It's just not everything a true home is.

To end, I want to leave you with another question. Who are the people in your life that are part of your home?

A side note: I recently got to listen to an author that was introduced to me in the 9th grade. Her name is Sandra Cisneros, and if you haven't read her books The House on Mango Street and Carmello (I'm reading this one, I take back some of my sass), I strongly suggest them to you. They are written in vignette style, which carries an elegance unknown to most, but quite fitting for the English language. It's like the analog, vignette is to English as condensed poetic form is to Chinese. Highly limited in length, a requirement for the most precise control of the language. Regardless, she talked (and talks) of homes, what they are to her, and how she dreams of them. For more insight, I highly encourage a glimpse into The House on Mango Street.

Another side note: Ayn Rand also mentions the necessity of a home for the self in her book, The Fountainhead. It's a bit daunting of a read, and she certainly does press her philosophy deep into your psyche; however, she makes claims about a home for the individual that I believe ring true to nearly every person. In a metaphoric perspective, she makes even more complex, interesting points about home, but you'll have to read for yourself to get what I mean.

Topic 3: Home - Matt Litzsinger

Whatever and wherever home is, it's one of the most reliably positive places in our world. It's a place where you can be open and vulnerable, because you know you won't be judged. It's a place where you can be yourself, know that that person is cared for and loved, and not try to put on a front. It's also a place from which you can reliably derive happiness. Home meets many of our basic physical and emotional needs as humans, so it's no surprise that we tend to gravitate towards our version of home, but how do we determine what home means to us?


image by viahouse.com

The Role of Home / Leaving Home

I believe that to understand home, we have to contemplate home with its opposite (being uncomfortable, being away from home); because we take our homes for granted, our views of what a home does may under-represent what functions it actually does provide. Looking at the presence of home and the absence of home is meant to counteract this biases.

1. You must anticipate a safe return to voluntarily leave.

In order to voluntarily leave home, we have to anticipate being able to return in the future. Let's examine this for a moment. There is something that is biologically hard-wired into humans about having a home - we as a society often value fitting in over standing out. Why is this? Going back to our hominid days, it would have been more advantageous to survive if you were in a part of a tightly-knit group who defend the other members in the pack, making the overall group much stronger. This makes it very advantageous to be in a tightly-knit group, which explains the huge incentive to make friends in the modern world. When we decide to leave home, we have the perception that something else is better (perhaps another home), or that when leaving home we will be able to return, thus keeping the benefits of that home. These interactions of temporarily leaving groups and joining others is too complex to discuss here, but the point is that leaving home must:

1. Have high perceived value
2. Allow for a safe return

In addition, we could apply these concepts of leaving and returning home to music. First of all, we would consider the home to be the key that the music is in. Whenever we start the piece in a certain key, we expect to return to that key at the end of the piece, maybe even by the end of the phrase. These expectations are also associated with emotions; wherever there is dissonance, we feel tension and anxiety, and whenever there is consonance, we feel emotional release and catharsis. However if these expectations are not eventually met, we are deeply dissatisfied because of the emotions that go with these expectations; this could be the reason that people dislike atonal music (music without a particular underlying key), because there is nowhere to return to. This role of "home" within music also reveals a particular function of home that is often forgotten: it provides structure among the chaos of everyday goings-on. The structure of tension and release is usually reasonably predictable (4 or 8 bar phrases), and allow humans to understand and make peace with the chaotic world (represented by the piece).

image by Susukifarag

To reiterate, without safety at home, we will not feel compelled to venture out. This means more reclusive behavior, and less willingness to try unfamiliar and unknown activities. However, when you do have a safe, reliable home, those activities become much more fulfilling. Except for maybe your biological home, which has likely always been your home since birth, we at some point were an outsider at all places we consider home. This makes branching out and finding new opportunities for home extremely important.

Finding Home

Many people consider their true homes to be wherever their favorite people are; so a similar approach to finding a home could be used.

1. Observe potential groups from the outside

1. This is similar to the approach I discussed in week 1 with making friends. Try to observe a group from the outside and look at how they treat each other? Are there one or two beneficiaries with every one else following the motions or is everyone benefiting? This could help you understand your role should you try to make that your new home.

2. Nostalgia

Think of your most nostalgic moments. Nostalgic moments have a sense of home and familiarity to them and are distinctly positive (never negative); it is a way of making sense of our past and using it to predict what might work in the future. It also makes returning home much sweeter; you remember all the good aspects of home, want to remember and reflect on the past, and thus learn what places functioned most easily as home and what was so special about those places. For these reasons, nostalgia seems to be a very good way to remember where your home is and what you value most.

Conclusion

"Home is where the heart is" - it's cliché, but true. It's a way for us to make sense of the world, understand what environments are conducive for our emotional and physical well-being, and be as happy as possible. Nostalgia helps us to understand the keys to our emotional and physical well-being, and reminds us to be happy. These feelings are especially strengthened after a long period away from home. Home grounds us in what is distinctly human: interpersonal relationships, caring for one another, and enabling the happiness of others. No other species does this in quite the same way as humans, so cherish this; it allows our society to function properly.