On Christmas Eve, I sat in the warmed seat of my parents' minivan with my 17-year old brother, my dad, and my mom. We were driving around Bergen County through the neighborhoods I had gotten to know when I was in high school. We were visiting all of the places that we knew had the best Christmas lights, including a house in Fair Lawn, New Jersey that programs its lights to a crazy symphony of broadcasted music (high commitment, folks). It felt like a normal Christmas eve for a Jewish family - we had nothing better to do than our annual tradition of admiring the neighborhood while playing a high school playlist as the soundtrack.
I was home for the December holidays for the first time since moving to San Francisco, a new home with a new job. It felt bizarre to have a new set of memories of a new home jammed in with the memories of my old home, a home many years removed.
What even counts as "home" these days?
I spent high school in Ridgewood, New Jersey. I tear up a little (lot) when I see Ridgewood memorabilia in the Etsy-like gift shops in our downtown's local stores. But I also grew up in a combination of Jersey City and London, and after I attended college in Texas, my professional career started at Deloitte Consulting, a job which took me throughout the country and -- at times -- across the world.I share this to say that home is a complicated concept for me, and in our highly mobile, globalizing world, the idea of home for ANYONE is much more elusive than ever before. What even counts as "home" these days?
Exploring the Notion of Home
When at Rice University, coming back to our forever green campus after the holidays was a disorienting experience of coming home. The difference is that when you're in college, you're coming to friends right after being at home with family. Especially when you're a teenager, your self-centeredness shatters a little bit when you realize that life everywhere else goes on without you even when you leave places that may have once been your undisputed home. (By the way, I wrote about this experience when I used to write for Seventeen Magazine as a college freshman. Lol.)
When working at Deloitte, after Thursday night flights back from the client, going to the office on Fridays felt like coming home. In the first year at the firm in particular, Friday lunches meant the opportunity to hang out with other business analysts in person (not just through Skype Lync). Over salads and Chick-Fil-A in the downtown Houston tunnels, we'd realize together that our complaints and successes weren't unique, but rather set of shared experiences that we helped each other through together.
When the following Monday came around, I'd be going back "home" to the client site, wherever that may have been with my project team and leadership. Between our project team family, gut-busting work on Excel and PowerPoint, and morning and evening routines, we were forced to grow in ways that made what would have been just another seemingly random town or city feel unexpectedly like home.
Elevator selfie. Note the cowboy boots - it was important to go out with a bang.
Saying Goodbye
After a few years at the firm, handing in my badge at our Heritage Plaza office after a final elevator selfie was yet another departure from home in Houston to create a new home in San Francisco. Working at a new company is an experience of building yet another home. But life changes and ebbs and flows; that home inevitably enters your list of homes, and life goes on.There's a popular quote that says that says you pay a price for the richness of loving and knowing people in more than one place. The price? That you will never be completely at home again, because part of your heart will always be elsewhere.
But I maintain that home is an illusion. The points of your past -- both high and low -- will always be a part of you. The connections we make -- the mentors, friends, coworkers, family members -- become the fibers of our roots. We keep up with those roots in spaces like LinkedIn. As Henning Mankell says, we carry these roots with us and decide where they grow through life's changes. The illusion of home is a woven fabric of people and places that you get to take with you; after all, when you come home, wherever that may be, there is no soundtrack, and that place has no heartstrings to be found. It's the heartstrings within you that play.
Hopefully I'm not alone here -- where is home for you? Any place in particular? Or is it just a feeling to you, also?
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