Home

The phrase apparently goes “Home is where the heart is.”  I believe the phrase was meant to be symbolic of where the subject’s thoughts and preferences lay.  I don’t agree with that interpretation.

For the last 6 years I’ve lived away from home.  I spent one year at university, two years in Toronto, and returned to university for the past three years.  Although I love visiting my parents (what the symbolic interpretation of the phrase would imply is “home”), I know this isn’t where I live.  However, it is home.  But only so far as I am living here for the next 10 days.  Then I will return to the place I normally sleep and where I pay (too much for) rent and live 96% of the year.

But that wasn’t always home.  I’ve been in three different complexes at university this year.  Each of those places was home for the time I lived there.

So what is my home?  It’s the place where my physical heart beats.  It is wherever I am.  Wherever my head hits the pillow at night, that is home.  Home is literally where the heart is.  And to make the symbolic statement true, I have to work to love where I am.

Maybe there’s a lesson in that…

Love where you are; you never know how much longer you will be there.