Cornershop - Good to Be on the Road Back Home

Define It For Yourself

1. Here’s a personal question: what does the idea of “home” mean to you? Consider that for a moment. Let the idea roll around in your mind. What is home? For my dad, it means his lady. “Wherever Patrice is, that’s home,” he once wrote me. For my friend Jillian, it’s “a glass of whiskey and a warm fire.” Home can be an abstract, a loose concept, hard to define in a personal sense. Home, for many people, is an entire city. This is your chance to testify New Yorkers. Bostonians, you too. There’s your actual, physical home. You got your walls, your roof, and maybe a leaky faucet in the bathroom. That's where you keep your stuff, and where you sleep when you're not out there dealing with the chaos of the world. Home is your fortress, your shelter from the storm, where the WiFi connects automatically. Some consider an entire state home like our boy Tim Riggins on Friday Night Lights.

   

   Texans, man…

   The idea of home sets the order for us. We venture out to discover ourselves and the world in which we live, and then we come home. In baseball that constitutes a run.

2. Home is such an important idea that we have dozens of idioms centered on home. People like to say “Home is where the heart is.” Sometimes your heart is a fickle bastard. It's not always at home; sometimes it's out there chasing dreams or trying to find a decent cup of coffee. I was never a fan of “Home is where I hang my hat.” I’m not a fan of clichés anyway, but that one never applied to me, so I couldn’t care less. I moved a dozen times before I was a teenager. I didn’t see my mother and stepfather’s new house until I had been in the Navy for three years. That certainly wasn’t home. Couldn’t be. My Dad moved too and his place was comfortable, but not home. If I relied on the folksy wisdom of that tired cliché I could reasonably call 20 different ships at sea home, quite a number of tents, barracks rooms, and sleeping bags home. That doesn’t work. At all. I left for basic training a month and three days after I turned 18. It was a Tuesday. I didn’t have a real or metaphorical concept of home. That came much later.

3. What I realized sometime around my 37th year on this planet was that my life experiences and adventures taught me to carry home with me. I’ve got peace in me whether I’m in a cabin in a snowy wood or Hong Kong’s city center. Really, I just want to know what the perfect temperature on the shower dial is. That’s special. I don’t need a passport to snack on my couch while I watch Steve Yzerman’s career highlights on YouTube, but I still have a passport because Fiji exists. I have friends out there now on the grand adventure, moving out from home on the basepaths trying to score a run for the home team. To all my friends who knew me before I set sail, and the ones I met along the way, this one’s for you. This is for those of us still out discovering and for those who are at home, ready for the return. In the end, whether you're talking about your four walls or your inner peace, home is a concept. It's wherever you decide it is, and it's as real or as metaphorical as you want it to be. So go ahead, make yourself at home – whether that's on the couch or in the deep recesses of your own existential crisis.