As I began to write this little crumpet, the immortal words of my friend Walter J. Schneider rang in my ears:

“He may, in reference to toil and effort and heat, quote an axiom about churn baby churn, but never would he quote anything about Truth, Beauty and a Grecian urn. Real men don’t quote Keats...”

With this in mind I began to dig into the nature of my home and it was then I realized that this was not going to be pretty.

Home Sweet Home

My home is in Ottawa, Canada. I consider it to be among the most beautiful cities I have visited and is the city I live in by choice. Lots of parks. Lots of rivers. My apartment is in what would be considered the “nice part of town”. It is nice. My apartment smells predominately of my dog… sometimes like my cats litter box (it is currently in the living room in an endless attempt to keep it away from the dog who considers cat poo a delicacy). This is my home.

Or is it?

There are an almost endless set of metaphors and clichés associated with the word home: “home is where the heart is”, “home is where you hang your hat”, “home on the range”, “homeless”, “home boy”, “home page”, “be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home”, “a man’s home is his castle”, “you can never go home again”, “home plate”, “home run”, “Sherlock Holmes” (… err.. scratch that), but what does it actually mean? What is “home”?

For a lot of young people “home” may be the house where they grew up. For independent adults it may well be that “home” is where their family lives. A traveler, when asked, might call the city he lives in “home”. Immigrants may call “home” their country of origin.

It would seem then, that there is no *one* definition of “home”, and that a lot depends on context. So, in reality, perhaps we can say that “home” is simply a construct… a “state of mind” if you will.

Hard hats required

“Eh?” you’re thinking, “a construct?”

Ah, the big mystery word: “Construct”… what does it mean? A construct is little more than a label (or series of labels) attached to something that helps give it some sort of “meaning” or perhaps help to define a “purpose”, but in which the “meaning” or “purpose” is or could be arbitrary (yikes).

To help clarify this idea, let me give you an example (we’ll leave the definition of “meaning” for another time, for now just plug-in your own, it should suffice):

The object we call a “mug” is in reality little more that a blob of matter that does nothing on its own. When we attach the label “mug” to the object itself, the object would now seem to have a “purpose” (a vessel to contain hot liquid magma, or however you wish to define it. It really is up to you). A mug’s defined “purpose”, however, is tightly bound to the label. So, in this example the construct is the combination of the label and a defined purpose associated with that label.

The first problem which arises from this (or any) construct is that no other thing in the universe would regard that object as a “mug” unless they shared both our perceptual and contextual framework. Otherwise it/they would, at best, perceive a pile of matter shaped in the form we have labeled a “mug” and its purpose (if any) would remain unclear (or unimportant – the purpose if the mug is irrelevant to the table it is sitting on).

There is a further problem: while the object’s shape has a useful purpose based on our construct, the label “mug” is of no real importance to the function of the object (I could call it a cow, but still drink my coffee from it), nor is the function limited to that which is defined by the label (if I put soil in the mug and plant flowers in it, is it not now, in reality, a flower pot?). So we see that the object we labeled “mug” is without any intrinsic (self-contained) meaning, as is the label itself. When the same process is applied to any construct, one can rapidly determine that by extension, all constructs are also without intrinsic meaning.

Something fishy

Confused yet? Look at it this way…like the old saying goes… “A rose by any other name would smell just as sweet”. The philosophical question posed by that statement is: What defines a “rose”? Its smell, color, shape or label? (its label obviously, it’s a rose only because we chose to call it such).

How does this relate to the concept of “home” you ask? It doesn’t really, I just wanted to talk about constructs… just kidding… it does relate… ahem, I’ve just forgotten how… oh yes…

If home is, as I mentioned, a state of mind and little more than a construct, then the ramifications of this should be clear to just about everyone:

Should we then not always be home?

If so, does acknowledgment of the concept then not make true the statement: “Home is where you hang your hat”? It would seem to, but then again, if we agree that “home” is indeed a state of mind, and not a fixed place or thing… why do so many of us long to “return home”?

Well, I do have a thought on that.

Between the ears

One of the banes of human existence is this: We tend to believe our constructs are somehow based on some sort of universal reality or truth. This is, unfortunately, an unsupportable position (from a both scientific and philosophical point of view), but one in which almost all of us engage.

The belief that our constructs are based on some sort of universal truth results in a tendency to place value on our constructs and attach emotional binds to objects, people, places and ideas (houses, families, nations and political/religious systems). It’s these binds, these strings of attachment that draw us ever back to the place we call “home”, and which helps to provide a sense of stability and belonging… even identity.

The irony, of course, is that like “home”, the sense of “stability”, “belonging” and “identity” are in themselves “constructs” and thus are also ultimately without any intrinsic meaning (as is this essay).

Perhaps if we as a species could begin to recognize that home *is* only a state of mind - a construct or a label - we might begin to learn to respect those places we don’t call “home” and begin to recognize that they are of equal value to the place we do. When that happens, the concept of “alien” or “foreign” should disappear along with all of the irrational baggage normally attached to those two concepts (xenophobia, tribal and colonial mentalities being but a few examples of said baggage).

Of course, I suspect that such recognition is beyond our capacity at a societal level in humanity’s current evolutionary iteration (though perhaps not on a personal level). But in the hope that I am wrong I would like to say:

Welcome to my home. It is home to everyone.