How do you determine where "home" is?
And, obviously, I don't just mean the house you live in. I mean, how do you decide to stay somewhere? What factors do you consider?
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17 comments:
By the network of friends in the area, how important are they to your welfare, and that of your family. Does being here make you/allow you to feel safe. Is the weather a constant threat to your well being, or are you comforted by it.
Do the seasons speak to you? Would it be different, and somehow less desirable in the future, What are the economic prospects of the area until the kids are grown?
These are some things that come to mind for me.
oooo a tricky question. I always subscribe to the "ya know it when ya see it". But it's hard.
Where you feel right. Where as soon as you get there, you have peace inside you.
That's my final answer.
Home is where my people are. I'm home when I'm with my family, regardless of where we happen to be.
The past few years we've moved around. We've been doing school (husband), then moving for work. And we're moving again for different work and I'll be going back to school. We keep packing up and relocating. Home has to do with where we're together rather than what city or house we live in.
Home is usually where I have a good network of people I love, surroundings that feel supportive and encourage me to be a better person, and safety. That's not to say a place has to have all those things for me to live in it, because there's nothing wrong with living away from home for a while and then coming back. Sometimes, once you up and move, you discover that you've made the new place into "home" pretty quickly and you have no need to go back. Depends on the place.
That's such a difficult question. Having lived in Holland for almost 10 years, I still don't feel like this is really HOME. Yet when I go back to Canada to my home town, that doesn't feel like home anymore either. I'm in limbo.
I think the things that make you feel like a place is really home is being comfortable in the actual house you live in, having a support network through family and friends, being able to deal day to day with your surroundings (language, culture, etc) and actually being able to see a future there for yourself.
A place where I can be relatively close to my extended family, a place where I'm comfortable and close to work, friends, stuff to do, a place where I like the weather, a place where I can see myself staying long-term (for instance, I don't have kids yet, as you know - but if I lived someplace with a crappy school system, no matter how much I liked it otherwise, I couldn't feel comfortable b/c I would know that I'd have to move).
A big part of feeling at home for me was knowing that we weren't going to move anytime soon. This was our third house in less than five years of marriage, and I finally feel "home" because I know we're not going to move again in a couple of years. So I guess part of what makes it home is a conscious decision that it IS home, you know?
Hat. Hang. Home.
for me its how comfortable I am in being somewhere. Can I get places driving by myself and not depend totally on my husband? Needless to say Iowa was starting to feel like home before we moved to the middle of San Louey. Oh well. We hope to move very soon, to just outside a smallish town, with just enough things to keep us going (super wal mart, a few grocery stores, autozone, you know the important stuff), and just enough other stuff to occupy us when we're bored or out and about, like a library, fast food, etc.
I tend to follow my intuition about things so as long as a place "feels" right, I can make it work.
I did get sick of my hometown, Vancouver. The pollution and traffic and noise got to me. So now I'm in rural Va where I watch the deer go through my yard and the buzzards roost in the trees across the street. After 10 years, it still delights me. :)
Was that an answer?
I need to be near my mom for it to be home for me.
Home is where your heart is happy.
Home for me is where it's a nice place to raise the kids.
Northern Virginia was not a nice place for me to raise kids.
Raleigh, NC? Much better.
Home is where I want to be when I feel lonely and sad.
I've always considered the town I was born and raised in as 'home' but now that I've lived in Colorado for a longer period of time than I lived where I was born and raised, I consider this to be home.
But really, to answer your question: home to me is where I feel comfortable. Home to me is the place where my quality of life is the best it can be.
Ahhh, I'm often conflicted on this. Home = (usually) where my family is. Even though my parents live in a town I haven't lived in since I was a baby, it's still home, bc that's where my family is.
At the same time, when I'm with the fam, I feel that Halifax is home (not where they live), but when I'm not with family, home is where they are.
Home is where your heart is.
I would love to make that decision based on factors like family, friends, appealing weather, fun stuff to do. But so far our location has been dictated by jobs more than anything else. Having grown up closer to the mountains in SC, I still have not acclimated to calling Eastern NC home yet. And its been 20 freakin' years.
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