“How essential it is…to be able to live inside a mind with attractive and interesting pictures on the walls.” – William Lyon Phelps
Home, is not so much a concrete place built of brick and mortar, as a state of mind; a comfortable, safe place; filled with diverse contributions of this thought, that idea, a thing – or a zillion things, and people who’ve deposited bits of matter into the place.
Home is a tapestry that tells a coherent story on the front, but underneath is a rather ratty, gnarly jumble of multi-colored threads that couldn’t possibly produce such a purposeful design, could they?
Home is where you are. When I taught college-level Marriage and Family classes, I based all underlying theory of the family on where we are now; not where we were or where we might be, but where we are and where might we go from here. (Random thought – Sex researchers, Masters and Johnson’s theory of human sexuality was based on the responses of prostitutes; how’s that for a biased sample? I say this because home and one’s state of mind is really about being real, genuine, flawed, and a variation of normal – not some ideal, fake, dating site model of citizenry – and moving on from here.)
Home is where you dwell – a state of mind? Yes. Furnishings, stuff, are just reminders, cues, tokens of a life lived; things that assist with memories that remind us of experiences, along with the feelings those experiences stimulated – all of which are the substance of happiness.
Why do we want to stay home, or come home? Is it because that’s where the things are that define us, that remind us of who we are; and reassure us that all is well?
This might be why there is such a lot of emotion bound up in the buying and selling of homes. Perhaps home is the seat of memories and the place where we reconcile our past and plan our future, while living in the present. More than anything, I want there to be “attractive and interesting pictures on the walls” of mine🙂.