What is Home and How Does It Happen?

Where is home? What is home? How does a place become home?
Those questions are all intertwined. Let's take a look at them.

                        "Home is behind, the world ahead,
                        And there are many paths to tread
                        Through shadows, to the edge of night,
                        Until the stars are all alight.
                        Then world behind and home ahead,
                        We'll wander back and home to bed..."
                        (From the Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R.Tolkien)

Possible homes, or perpetual exile?

First, I should explain that I am not a TCK (Third-Culture Kids: Children of parents from one culture but who grow up in another culture, and thus form their own, 'third' culture, of people unfamiliar with the culture of their parents yet not insiders of their surrounding culture).

"Where are you from?" is an infamous question for them, as there is really no good way to answer this question for someone who, for example, was born in Indonesia to missionary parents who are from Canada but spent most of their teenage years in Korea. Or for someone whose parents were in the military, and who grew up around a succession of military bases.
Which place do you pick to call home? The place your parents are from but you've spent little time in? Home shouldn't be a place you've never really lived. The place you were born but never participated in the culture? Home shouldn't be a place that is mostly unfamiliar. The place you spent most of your school years? You weren't born there, don't live there now, and are clearly not ethnically a member of that culture.

I can't answer these questions, and I don't have the background of a TCK.
But in some ways I can empathize with the overall problem.

I grew up in the American Deep South, and until I was 19 I had never flown farther than Colorado.
However by the time I was 13 my family had also moved 7 times for mostly job-related reasons, all within Alabama and Tennessee, and all but once relocating over 100 miles away. Since then I have also lived in Taiwan and Texas.

So, although I mostly can't identify with the cultural identity problem, geographically speaking I understand not knowing where to call home. So the question "Where are you from?" is becomes a largely contextual one. (If in Alabama, it's Tennessee. If in the South, it's Alabama or Tennessee. If elsewhere in America, it's The South, or Alabama, or sometimes Tennessee. If in Taiwan, it's America. If traveling, it's my current permanent address whether in Taiwan or America.) This will get even trickier after I've lived in Taiwan for a while.

But I've noticed a fact: "Where are you from?" and "Where's home?" are not the same question.

You can't change where you came from, but your home can change.
It can move from one place to another, and you can have more than one home.

Disagree? I will list a few things that are true of a place that can be called home.
Maybe we can find out how home "happens," or how we can make it happen.

1. A Place Where You Feel Comfortable/Safe Can Become Home

This one is not universally true. A teenager can be very uncomfortable in their parents' home, yet not have any other place which could reasonably be called home. Home could be in a dangerous part of the world where the feeling of safety is a rare luxury. But for adults, especially traveling adults, it's hard for a new place to become home if you still don't feel comfortable or safe there. For missionaries, this is often a slow process where one slowly begins to feel comfortable and safe in a new environment as one grows accustomed to it, when possible.
Part of feeling comfortable or safe in a new area is the establishment of routines. A place can start to feel homey when you become aware of the rhythms of life there; what times to avoid the worst traffic on certain roads or when the corner fruit stand will be manned, which parks will be full of people walking their dogs on lazy afternoons, etc.

2. A Place with People You Care about Can Become Home

It's hard to think of home in the normal sense apart from the presence of loved ones (Of the different kinds of love in classical Greek thought, "Storge," affectionate or (originally) familial love, is what we are referencing here), but for many people their current place of residence is far from any family and sometimes any of their previous friends. However be it family members, a spouse, old or new friends, or even partners in work or ministry who mean a lot to us and whose presence we come to value, the relationships we have with other people are a huge factor in whether a place feels like home or not.


If we find ourselves in a new location where we don't know anyone, cultivating meaningful relationships with new people can be tough, especially if it's obvious the stay is temporary. But regardless of the difficulties involved, these relationships are an integral component of wherever our home is. I would venture to say a place where we have no meaningful relationships at all or are not at least in the process of developing them simply cannot be home in any real sense.

Something TCKs have often described to me is the learned tendency to form friendships quickly but be ready to emotionally disconnect from them just as quickly when it's time to move on. While this creates problems of its own, it's a survival technique that allows the relationships we require as human beings to develop while to some extent insulating one from the emotional strain of parting.

3. A Place You Love Can Become Home

Sometimes strong positive emotions can be attached to a place too, usually after having good memories there. I cannot pass by a certain stadium off the metro line in Taipei without thinking of the time my Chinese teacher helped me get inside to see a Linkin Park concert for free. The experiences do not even have to be good; repeatedly making trips to the visa office with Taiwanese coworkers trying to renew my visa had the interesting consequence of making Taiwan the place where I was now fighting to stay.

Humans are interesting in this way; we can develop some sort of affection for anything that is familiar, be it a person, neighborhood dog, or interestingly-shaped rock. These familiar objects, and especially the curious pleasure they bring when seen after an absence (This is important, see the next point), are like totems marking the presence of home.

4. A Place You Return to Can Become Home.

That feeling of "I'm back," even when "back" is back to the place you are living temporarily after a brief trip elsewhere, is the feeling of coming home. Sometimes that feeling is the first obvious sign that a place has become home.
After a few months in Taiwan, I first began to realize how much like home it had begun to feel after a trip to Macau and the city of Nanchang in mainland China. Once Taiwan went from "the least familiar place I've lived" to "much more familiar than Nanchang or Macau, which are both now more familiar than places I've never been," a major attitude shift had occurred. America was one step farther behind; still the place I had spent nearly all my life, but the new normal had changed.

"Coming back" to a place where we've had a little time to be established is a powerfully evocative sensation which can turn a place from "away" to "home." It seems that 'unfamiliar/familiar' is hard to quantify, but 'less familiar/more familiar' is much easier to recognize and respond to.

5. A Place Where You've Won/Lost Can Become Home

Victory and defeat are also powerful experiences and emotions that can be strongly associated with place, making it unconsciously feel more like home. At which restaurant did you meet your planning team to celebrate a successful event? On which park bench did you sit on and ponder your own grief after breaking up with someone? I strongly suspect that the particular, peaceful feeling (whether happy or unhappy) you had when returning from either situation and shutting your door behind you was that of returning home.

6. A Place You're Too Busy to Think About Can Become Home

Sometimes a place becomes home not through any efforts of our own, but slowly, by default. When you are busy all day, struggling at whatever task, and finally arrive again at your place of residence weary and ready for a shower and sleep, the difference between familiar and unfamiliar can become blurred. The surrounding culture and language might still be unfamiliar, but that repeated bus ride to your apartment or the street you drive down to get there can become familiar very quickly.

Of course it's true that when we're exhausted the unfamiliar can become even more jarring, the culture shock more shocking, but the converse is also true. Sometimes you're too tired to feel stressed that the language is 'wrong,' or the food is 'wrong,' or the temperature outside is 'wrong.' You need a place to rest and recover, and when necessary you may find that you forcibly recruit your surroundings to be home whether they are well-suited to the task or not.

Sometimes a place becomes home because it begins to feel suitably homey; sometimes we subconsciously decide a place must necessarily become home because we need to feel suitably homey.

Ergo: Steps To A Home

So then, if we turn these ideas around, we get a list of some possible ways that a new location can become home for us.

To Make A Place Home:
1. Establish safety and comfort there (if possible)
2. Seek meaningful relationships with people there
3. Find things you love about the place itself
4. Go on trips to less familiar places and come back
5. Experience triumphs and defeats there
6. Keep busy

It's not an exhaustive list, but maybe it's enough.
Home is where you make it, and what you make of it.

What are some ways you've made a new place into home?