Home is where?

I’ve been thinking about adaptability lately. On the mundane end: car doesn’t start, take the bus; out of butter for the mac and cheese, add more milk. It’s all good. At the extreme end it’s adapt or die, in which case the US Marines and Bear Grylls tell us to Improvise-Adapt-Overcome. (That also happens to be good life coaching for non-perilous situations.) People constantly adapt to change happening around them, sometimes with awareness but quite a lot of time without noticing.

Some adaptations are more easily managed than others. For instance, I’m in the process of adapting to retirement. It’s not easy. I can watch TV all day if I want to, even if it’s not the weekend, but my pre-retirement brain still tells me that’s not okay. It tells me I must be productive, no matter how intriguing the new series I found might be. Since I really like watching TV and don’t mind a period of non-productivity, I must adapt to the post-retirement situation. I therefore overcome my pre-retirement brain, and let it know that not only are we going to watch TV, we’re going to have salty snacks while we do. The improvisation part is pretending that low-cal, low sodium oyster crackers are an acceptable salty snack rather than chips. There are many more examples, I’m just adapting all over the place these days.

Lately, though, my thoughts on adaptability were more in relation to the romanticized memories a person has of their birthplace, or what I think of as the overall emotional concept of “Home”. The scope of “Home” can be as small as the house a person grew up in, or as large as the country (or planet, solar system, galaxy, universe) of their citizenship. The enveloping essence of Home that is absorbed growing up often becomes even more powerful if a person who is fully adapted to their birthplace happens to leave it. They take Home with them, tucked safely in the back of their mind. Home is lovingly recalled as being without flaw or fault and serves them as an emotional back-up plan. It’s a safeguard, a place to run to if life goes sideways. Home always has to take them in.

On the other hand, there are people who view their birthplace as a nearly inescapable prison. They can’t wait to leave it, both physically and emotionally. They don’t take Home with them and become emotionally Homeless, their psychological tethers broken and left behind. I left my birthplace, and for a long time I thought Home for me could only be tied to the place I left. But I adapted to a new place, and it turns out Home is transferable. It feels to me now like my DNA was formed here, in the cells of this place. The ecological essences of weather, water, and terrain flow through me more truly here than those of my birthplace ever did. This is where I belong, even though it’s nearly the opposite of the place where I was physically formed.

I adapted, and Home is in my heart again.