It was while travelling around, doing a bit of a road trip around my home area, southern Ontario, got to near the furthest point away from my home, right down in the southwestern corner of Ontario, and I started to think about what really makes a home.
What is it about home that makes it different from any other place?
It could be really interchangeable in some way.
It doesn’t have to have any special characteristics, since each of us has a different home somewhere else around the world.
So there’s so many different possible physical arrangements of a house, or a home.
But what seems to make home special is just that it’s somehow specially configured for us.
It’s like a space that fits us, that is set up in a way that is just for us.
In that way, home is almost like our friend, in terms of a physical space that wants to help us.
It’s there to make things as safe and comfortable and helpful as possible for us.
So just like any person can be anywhere from a complete stranger to a dear friend, for any particular person, it’s the same with a space.
And so a particular physical space, being your home, it is really like being your close friend.
And so I see this like one way of looking at it is that home is simply an application of love to physical space, to the physical environment.
How do we turn some kind of neutral space into a space that really feels like a home?
Well, that’s when it’s configured in a way to support us.
And what are the things that a home does?
I mean, for one thing, it should be safe, should be comfortable.
I guess will be familiar.
Something that tries to take care of our needs and help us when there’s a problem, and that’s everything that a friend should do.
So what really makes that home special is the amount of love put into it.
So it seems like any possible space could be turned into that feeling of home.
It just requires that expression of love, and that configuration of space in the service of that love, So really I wonder how this actually comes to life, and what does it mean?
So of course there’s the basics of having a shelter, so we can be safe from dangerous attack.
I guess in the past it would be maybe dangerous wild animals, and now it could be some kind of dangerous criminals or something.
Somehow having a wall and a locked door does give some security from that.
And of course simply from the elements of nature, just simply being protected from the cold and the wind and the rain, and so producing a space that is designed for us.
And that would just be the very basics.
But then beyond that would be the way that our space is designed to meet all our needs.
So of course, if we are hungry, we have food we can get at home.
We have a place where we can rest.
And in some ways, those would be the same for anybody.
And I guess that’s what like a hotel or a guesthouse is, where you have these generic amenities that are made to make you feel as comfortable as possible.
But why doesn’t it feel like home?
Home, there’s a certain personal nature to it.
It’s like the difference between somebody being polite and generally professionally helpful to you versus someone that is really behaving like your personal friend.
So it seems like this analogy of a home to a friend versus not home to a stranger, applying the way we would describe a person, we could also describe that about a space.
How do you feel about your home?
What makes home to you?
And what really is the difference between just a place where you happen to live and a place that truly feels like a home?
#home #homesweethome #homeislove