We sold our house. The house we built. The home we loved. There are reasons based in logic for why we sold. There are also matters of the heart that are still being negotiated for why we sold. All of those logical reasons carried me through the sale and onto our temporary digs from where I’m writing this entry. I imagined it would not be a big deal to move into 700sf of someone else’s space while we waited for the close of our new home. And then after that closing to move into another temporary housing situation for another six months while our home gets remodeled. No big deal, right?
Wrong.
What I’ve discovered in six short weeks is that I miss ‘home.’ Not our house, per se, but our home. I thought home is where the heart is. I thought as long as I was with Terry and the dogs, that’s where home was. And in part, it is. But there is something else missing. It’s not really tangible. It’s not our stuff- we got rid of most of that. It’s not the permanent physical address- we don’t have one at the moment. It’s something a bit deeper.
Home to me, to us, is respite and rest, joy and celebration, comfort and (yes) convenience, domain and element, retreat and sanctuary. It is in the realm of safety that we call it home and not hovel. The space that feels close to certain, not shifting.
What I’ve also discovered is living in another community is fun for a few days, until I realized that this wasn’t my community, my tribe. Sure, the people are great, the food is diverse and tasty, the streets and houses are perfectly adorable, but it too doesn’t feel like home.
Why, you might be asking, am I writing about this personal experience on our company journal? Because I realized through this experience what home means to me, and likely means to a lot of people. We work with a lot of amazing people and firms. Their sole jobs are to create communities and build homes. It is the desire of some of these firms to do this work with actual people in mind. Countless hours of planning and designing, and reworking and redesigning to manifest these places in which we hope to find that respite in our house and full connection with our neighbors and our neighborhoods. Thoughtful, considerate planning and execution is far from easy, or cheap, yet there are people out there who choose this path over just building and pushing rooftops and big box retail. I admire you. I praise you. I am grateful for you.
Home matters. Community matters. It gives more meaning and definition to how we play and operate in our own worlds rather than just shuttling from duty to duty only to crash into bed with no regard that our lives are for living.