Discovering Your True Home

Photo by Nikhil Prasad on Unsplash

“Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.” — Matsuo Bashô

With the recent sale and moving out of my house of the past 15 years, my mind has been pre-occupied with the concept of home. What is someone’s home? What meaning and significance does it possess? What role has it played in my life when I have had to say goodbye to a home?

According to publicly available records, I have called home to a multitude of places but a few have primary importance to me. My first home was a house in Port Jefferson, New York where I was born, to the home in which I was primarily raised in Center Valley, Pennsylvania, and finally to the home(s) in Maryland in which my children called home. Each house contains specific memories, some good, and some not so good, but they were often a place of love and support (and dysfunction as all families display in some degree or another) and shaped my view of myself and the world around me. They were places where I was nourished, learned, laughed, and cried.

In Pennsylvania, the single level “ranch” house which sat on “Bittersweet Road” was my childhood home. I can still remember its red shutters, and white brick with its deep etchings that wrapped around the rectangular house. Its yard was landscaped with a “fence” of pine trees that my oldest brother tirelessly dug and planted along with my mother to provide us privacy from our neighbors and Route 309 that was situated about the length of a well struck 7 iron from the backyard.

Over time the hum and rushing sound of the cars on the highway dissipated with the summer sounds of the crickets that sang their song amongst the tall grass blades that would eventually be cut and collected in a few months by the field’s owner. I would spend time in my backyard throwing and catching a baseball pretending to make the final out in the “big game” or kicking the winning goal as my soccer ball flew into the upper branches of the pine trees at the edge of the property that served as my “net.”

On the side of the house, next to an enclosed back patio, I would see my Mom and Dad filling the fire engine red Weber kettle BBQ with charcoal as they prepared to grill chicken that was marinating over night normally served with freshly steamed corn on the cob from the local roadside farm stand. Homemade strawberry trifle cake with delicious CoolWhip topping and crushed walnuts would await us for dessert.

My older brothers would come by with their friends while my Mom insisted that all of them each stay and eat dinner (even though they were never hungry) and they graciously acquiesced and joined us in our typical summer feast. My Dad would publicly compliment my Mom for another delicious meal, and everyone would join in that grateful chorus.

After the mandatory clean up, I would venture downstairs to the wood paneled basement to watch TV or practice playing “ping-pong” with half of the table upright and watch as the older kids planned their adventures later for that night. The brown, orange, and beige speckled carpet was typical seventies decor ensuring that anything spilled would never be permanent. The steel load-bearing I-beam that supported the house was boxed in by long wooden planks that we had struck with chains and chisels and then stained to give an appearance of a worn wooden beam more found in a barn than in a suburban basement. The drop ceiling consisted of a metal grid hung by metal wire filled with rectangular white textured foam boards. In the center of the lengthy room, multi-colored translucent plastic sheets covered fluorescent tubes of light that were spaced throughout ceiling to give the effect of stained glass hanging above it all. At the far end of the basement was the common feature that all Dad’s in the seventies apparently wanted …a homemade constructed bar. The bar was enclosed in the same wood paneling that adorned the walls and was topped with a formica countertop with four wooden bar stools with red vinyl seats while three shelves and a large mirror hung on the back wall with the various knickknacks from the times.

The basement would become my refuge for me and my brothers while the adults stayed upstairs drinking wine and coffee and talking about their lives and the events affecting them. This basement was where my friends and I gathered, played the latest video game, watched the Phillies or Eagles yearning to rise above mediocrity, celebrated life’s moments, conspired as to matters of teen mischief, and where we discovered ourselves, how we were alike and how we were different. This basement was also a place to escape family turmoil and where unfortunately it would sometimes had to be confronted with lasting impact for those involved.

From the age of 6 until I graduated college, I thought of Bittersweet Road as my home. A place I could always come back to. The place which witnessed and stored all of these memories and experiences embedded in its walls.

In 1993, my parents sold my childhood home as most parents eventually do, and I said my goodbyes quietly to myself with a sense of sadness, gratefulness, but also with a sense of inevitability since everyone in their own journeys find themselves walking away from their home to learn and grow. It is not a just a likely do…its a must.

For even though my childhood home was where certain beliefs and patterns were formed, it is also a place where our hero must venture away from to ultimately transcend and find himself in the journey that he or she must do alone. It is another critical chapter in each of our stories. It is outside of this place where the unknown awaits and only away from the comfort and confines of your home can those lessons be learned. As Gandalf said to Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit, “Home is now behind you, and the world awaits!”.

As I have grown, I have come to realize that home is simply just a place and not an identity. A physical structure where life and its circumstances and all of its colors merely unfolded. A place to gather. A place to eat. A place to interact with the ones you love and care about. A place to rest your weary head. A place to experience life.

But I have learned that a home is more of a feeling. A feeling of warmth, a feeling of love, a feeling of safety, a feeling of being seen, heard and understood, and a feeling of peace. One could live in a house and be the farthest away from one’s home. These feelings could be felt with a group of close friends enjoying each other’s company in a park or with someone that you care for. It doesn’t even require to involve or be with other people. It can be a feeling of calm and peace when someone is sitting alone next to a rustling stream or listening to a certain song.

Home as a house is a just temporary place, but with everything else in this lifetime, it eventually passes, and moves on as you must, but the concept of home as an inward feeling is always with us to be summoned when called. As the storms of life unavoidably rise, you may feel that without a “house to call home” you are adrift or displaced, but the truth is that your true home is always with you. And when shared with those you love, it radiates even more brightly.

These lessons ring true even more as my own children are saying their goodbyes to their childhood home but it is a realization that they must come to on their own. I myself am saying my own goodbyes for what was, what was not and what could have been. Finding gratitude for the memories while accepting the sadness for the loss.

Saying such goodbyes is never easy. My hope and wish is that they cherish the positive memories including the ones they created with themselves and their friends in their own unique “basement” while affording some compassion and forgiveness toward those unwanted memories and those who shaped them for better or for worse but always with loving intentions.

To be at peace with yourself is an eternal place, and that place can never be bought, sold, left or moved away from. It is only to be sought, experienced and re-discovered on your own Knowing Road.

May you all be happy, may you all be well, without pain and suffering, and ultimately at ease and peace.

This article is published as part of the Knowing Road, an email newsletter for those interested in improving the most important relationship in their lives — the one with themselves. To learn more and subscribe click here.