Like many of you reading this, I am back in my childhood home for spring break. I am surrounded by my immediate family, my two dogs that insist on sleeping at all possible hours of the day and I am sleeping in a bed that has been idle while I’ve been away.
There is an odd stillness when you return home, especially to the house that you were raised in. Part of it has to do with the fact that some things remain the same. I’m allowed the freedom to go on a 10 mile run whenever I want as long as I give a heads up, but I’m driving somewhere a 12-step plan must be laid out about what I’m doing and where I’m going. Or the dynamics between family members being roughly the same no matter how much space or time separates everyone.
I think that stillness is uncomfortable though, because you’ve now become unfamiliar with that familiar setting. The essence of the relationship between you and your family is the same, but the time and space greatly affect how it plays out, I find I’m much quieter at home than I am back at school. There’s almost so much to talk about, the new things you’ve seen and done, the ups and downs. But you don’t know where to start.
It’s the same for your family that you’ve been separated from, there’s a shared bond between you and them, but there’s this almost silent insistence to just remember how things were and never deviate from that. You’re keeping everything comfortable and familiar for yourself and for others.
Some of this has to do with the weight of the home. No matter how much time passes, it still feels the same, the same people, the same dynamics and shared memories; it would be awkward and disruptive to go around toting how much new you have experienced in this setting that asks for care and preservation. Those memories in a home are hefty, they are hung up on walls and exist as random knick-knacks on tables or shoved into the garage.
Sometimes it feels like you have evolved beyond the image your home has perfectly remembered you as and that uncomfortable feeling happens because you and your family both know that the image the home remembers you as is different, maybe not in obvious ways but certainly in subtle ways.
I think we constantly need to be in conversation with ourselves and with our home and reimaging ourselves, our relationships and our practices. The home is sacred, but it is not static and it has everything to gain from those awkward conversations about how things have changed, whether for the better or worse or just an acknowledgement of how it’s different.
