Laura Pfeiffer about a place that everyone knows: home.
In souvenir shops around the world we can find tin or wooden signs with the words “Home is not a place but a feeling” or “Home is where the heart is”. At the very beginning, our home is usually where we live. This place may change over time, with us, with our circumstances, and it may take on a different meaning and role.
After school, most of them want to leave home. And even after a pandemic with lockdown exit restrictions, the obligation to work from home and the ban on almost everything that is fun outside of your own home, the urge for freedom and self-determination was very great for most of them. From now on it was back, the old freedom. In two weeks we squeezed everything that we had to do without completely for more than a year.
We firmly believe: We always want to get out first. Get out, get out, just don’t stop. Whoever stays has lost. At some point we all come back home – whatever that means individually.
The feeling of coming home is usually more than just a feeling for me. It’s specific places, like my own apartment with things like the wardrobe full of choices and all the other stuff that’s always available and found in that one specific place. But the neighborhood is also at home with your favorite café and restaurant, the bench under that particular tree or the smell of freshly mown grass.
Obviously there is a difference between feeling at home and coming home. But both give us the feeling of security, structures and rules. Somehow everything that we couldn’t get rid of fast enough in the past. We may have to get out, run away, separate ourselves, have our own experiences in order to be able to come back (home) to appreciate the place and the feeling. Because sometimes coming home is more than just a feeling.