Where is Home?

If someone told you to go home, where would you go? If someone asked you where home is, would your answer be different? The word "home" is an extremely fluid concept. To some, it's wherever you sleep at night, to others, it may be where you grew up, where you've spent the most time maybe. Some may not see a house as a home, but rather refer to a city as home, or maybe even a country.

This is my home, not for the building, but for the memories.

I invite you to consider this idea: Home is about experiences, not places.

In some ways, Bellingham is my home. It's the first place I ever lived alone; the city where my very first house is and always will be. It's where I earned my undergraduate degree, met professors, exchanged ideas, pulled (surprisingly) only a single all-nighter. In Bellingham I learned what bad roommates are, and I learned what great roommates are. I sprained my ankle 6 times in the 3 and a half years living in Bellingham, recovered from one broken heart, and suffered one concussion. I made best friends, and I lost best friends. A single fender bender, 3 calls to 911, and one major legal scare later, Bellingham has been host to some of the most defining points to my life. If I had stayed in Covington after high school, or gone to college in Seattle, or New York, or Alabama, I would be a different human being than I am today. So, more often than not, if someone asks me where home is, I'll tell them Bellingham, Washington.

Times like these made my college dorm home...

So what about all the times I've been at work in Bellingham, so excited to go "home" for the weekend? If Bellingham is home, why do I say I'm going home to Covington? Is one more home than the other? Not at all. They're home differently. Covington is my childhood. It's where my parents raised me, where I learned to drive, where I came out to my best friend. It takes credit for the first time I tied my shoes, all my years playing team sports, and the time I knocked my best friends teeth out playing chicken on a Big Wheel. It is every Christmas morning and Halloween night trick-or-treating of my life. As much as I can't stand Covington, it's always going to be home.

I owe my childhood to Covingon.
I'm the cute kid having her elbow bitten,
my sister is the one ready to punch the camera....

I love Bellingham, I less than love Covington, but I love who I grew to be in both places. Both will always be home. They will be the first two places in a never-ending list of "homes." Give me a month, and Morocco will forever be on my list of places I call home. And if I never came home from Morocco the rest of my life, and forty years from now somebody was to ask me where home was, Covington would still be a perfectly valid answer. Because physical location is forever evolving.

There's a Heraclitus quote that I've always loved: "No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man." This is why the concept of home is about experience, not location. One hour from now, Covington will be a different place than it is right now. And one hour from now, I won't be the same person I am right now. We as a population, and as individuals, are always changing and evolving. But once you experience something, nothing can take that experience from you. Home is an ever-evolving compilation of experiences.

So if you want to find home, don't talk to a real estate agent and buy some house somewhere. Go for a walk. Experience your surroundings. Talk to your peers. Explore somewhere new. Make yourself a part of your community. Follow these steps, and only then, you will find a home.