Where do we find home?

What do we mean by Home:

 

With half the world’s population apparently in search of a new homeland, the question arises as to what qualities or lifestyle a human being seeks in finding a place they may call home.

Naturally most people consider home the place or country in which they were born as home, their motherland or fatherland as the case may be. Over the centuries peoples have travelled far and wide the search of some illusive quality they consider desirable. Historically it would be fair to claim most moved either for economic reasons [overcrowding,. better hunting or cultivation of crops, forced removal, ] and so on would cover most of the popular reasons for leaving your birth place for the unknown.

How applicable are all these reasons in the international world of the 21^st cent., were we are witnessing the redistribution of ethnic or religious groups on an unprecedented scale.

Although it could be claimed that the relocation of an individual is less stressful than say a family group, the heartache is often the same. Moving in today’s world is often associated with conflict and assimilation not always assured.

To return to individuals on a more personal level, the meaning of home has different meanings. There are different words to describe this state, homelessness, homesickness, exile, alien are simply a few. To be homeless is self-explanatory to live on the street needs no explanation, but to be homeless may also mean stateless that to some extent means the same thing, you have nowhere to go.

Homesickness is entirely a different proposition, it presumes you have left your birth place for some reason, economic, adventure, or it just seemed a good idea at the time to go to some foreign or distant location, a place that does not qualify as the village down the road, somewhere exotic the unknown.

One of the strange conditions about homesickness is that there is often a reoccurring desire to return “home” in later life. This is particularly noticeable here in Australia were some 40% of the population are foreign born. You would imagine that regular visit to their homeland would quell this thirst for home, but this assumes that “home” remains the same, which of course it doesn’t.

 

Over the years I have spoken to many migrants who after living here in Australia for many years still don’t feel fully at home here. Sometimes due to cultural customs, the landscape, language, lack of contact with their stay at home relatives. Yet when they return home after years of absence, find they no longer relate to their mother country in the same way as before. Often due to new economic circumstances, migration or new political developments, nothing unfortunately ever remains the same. Some migrants who have taught their children their mother tongue find that their native language has moved on, and their version has become rather dated in their mother country. To some extent they have become stateless or citizens of the world belonging to no country in particular.

I often feel much of the dissatisfaction in their lives is due to this condition, that they no longer belong anywhere anymore. They belong to no country that they can truly call home, in the true meaning of the word. All of us set out on the adventure we call life without sufficient consideration of the long term consequences of our decisions. To further complicate our desire to belong somewhere there is the problem of marriage between different ethnic groups, now some 30% of the population marry into different ethnic groups, creating a new people a refinement that appears to focus immigrants on their new country, their new homeland as this is now the mother of your new life.