Home

 

 

I realize my posts lately have been brief, and rather…topical.

Sure, this is a blog.  That’s sort of the point.  But recently, I haven’t had much to say. 

Maybe it’s because of the hectic reconfiguring of time management and job scheduling. (I forget that Monday isn’t everyone else’s Friday too). The breaking-in period of a new environment and potential career.  The realities of being so green in the industry, and seeing this year’s grand adventure morph into a new kind of normal. 

Maybe I feel Skype and texts and emails closing a little gap between loved ones and me, and this is a redundancy.

Maybe October wasn’t my best month, for so many reasons, and that has been sorely reflected in my distracted half-presence here.

Or maybe, though I rarely admit it, I just sort of (really really) miss home.

I keep busy.  Too busy sometimes.  But from over here I’ve been missing out on so much. 

Homes and bridges being built.  Children growing up.  Aging and illnesses.  Coffee shops and margarita nights. Seafood and road trips and laughter and late nights talking. How the evening turns from yellow to green in summer. Big celebrations and little moments. And hugs…  

The concept of home is such an oddity, isn’t it?

For some people it is a place – a city, state, neighborhood, house. Stomping grounds on which a significant period of life was lived.

Or specific seasons or times with which feelings and memories are associated. 

For some it means people. Family, friends, loved ones, even stressful relationships and personal strain.  But always a familiarity of emotion and reaction.  Of dynamic and definition.

Home isn’t always a positive.  It can bring with it obligation, recurrence of a past that takes a lifetime to overcome.  Reminders of things that should be – or are wished to be – forgotten.

It so often becomes wherever we happen to be, and what we make of it.

It changes for each of us over time.

I recognize within myself both the desire to be closer and the truth that I don’t know if going home in any permanent sense is a viable option for me.  I know I can go home. That doesn’t mean I should.  I also know very well how fortunate I am to have such a wonderful place to consider mine.

These days, I swallow a little harder at the phrase “all the conveniences of home.”  Home is not convenient anymore.  I think that’s the hardest thing about it.  We all have lives of fully occupied time.  Lives in which we find each other scurrying across the days trying to make a little headway on our lists and survive those glitches we can’t see coming right for us. 

To all of you I call home, thank you. For being there, no matter the capacity. For sharing your lives with me, and sharing in my undertakings. For a lifetime of contexts, lessons, perspective. I guess I just want you to know – in the midst of your moments and mine – I’m pulling for you.  I’m thinking about you. I need you. I value you more than you can ever really know.  And I love you.

 

 

Here’s hoping everyone who stumbles across this eventually finds their own definition of home and fills it with greatness.