Today I reflected on how much I like to be home. I wonder what ties us to places, lets us feel comfortable there, soothes us and gives us our ground? I don’t think this is a parochial ‘mine is better than yours’ feeling, but rather one of familiarity, as if we vibrated at the same frequency as certain places.
Have you ever walked into a space and felt it is right for you? However you explain it, my experience is that some places are like that, and you won’t know until you stand in them. You might explain it by familiarity, but for me that’s no explanation at all. How do we become familiar, what sense do we use?
Beyond the familiar five senses, past the less familiar (sense of balance, motion, time, internal feelings, body position and more) lie complex ways of sensing that neuroscientists are starting to enumerate. I’d like to put in a bid for the sense of place, or sense of home. Perhaps this is to do with the energy of a place, or perhaps something even more complex and varied including many senses, associations and memories.
I imagine our early life profoundly affects what we might call home, and whether we found it a place of nurture, shelter, imprisonment or chaos. Whatever our experience of “home”, I think of it as somewhere we are comfortable and ourselves, where the world holds us within four walls. May you enjoy yours as much as I enjoy mine.
