The Case for Going Home
I’m at home right now. Every visit over the last year or so has reminded me of how much more home means to me than just seeing family, eating good food, and catching up with old friends.
Throughout undergrad, I always had roommates or suitemates. Before that I was obviously living at home with family. After starting work and living alone for the past year and a half, I miss having the unspoken company of others - specifically being around others in an environment where we are all comfortable but there’s no obligation to interact. Outside of home, the last time I felt that sort of camaraderie was studying with my suitemates in our living room - we’d often go hours without saying anything until one guy (probably me) would get up and go to sleep. Even if I had a rough day or was struggling through a hard problem, all of my memories of those times are peaceful, comforting, and warm.
Home also gives me a feeling of gentle nostalgia and wistfulness. Now, I can only get occasional snapshots of a place and world I used to be deeply immersed in. Changes come in waves instead of a trickle. I don’t have a great term for it, but I feel distant and familiar at the same time, a sort of continuous sensation of deja vu. This somber feeling is irreplicable and I find it makes me more appreciative and observant of minute changes in my rushed regular life.
Above all though, especially now, home is the one place I can go that is void of significant responsibility. Normally, I have to be at work during the week and social gatherings mean I’m busy in the evenings and the weekends. I find it suffocating sometimes - I’m being nudged everywhere I go to always be doing something. I should be living a life with abundance of choice yet I feel tied to countless commitments.
At home, outside of some chores, I have nothing to do, nowhere to be, and no one to see. The sensation is different than a regular vacation, where I might still have scheduled plans of landmarks to see, hikes to trek, or meals to eat. There’s also the imminent pressure of “I will likely not come back this place for a while, so visit everything you can.” At home, I’m free to just… slow down. To do and think about whatever.
Claude told me that Heidegger wrote substantially about this sensation, which he called langweile, German for “long while”. Heidegger’s explanation for this feeling is that generally, time is a resource we spend to meet the demands of others and ourselves - earn money, socialize, etc. But when these demands are stripped away, we are given absolute freedom on how to spend our time, forcing us to become aware of time as the essential resource itself. I can write a blog post, go to Costco with my parents, take a random walk around the neighborhood, or follow my cat around for an hour. Bored moments at home are among the only times I’ve ever felt like (1) I was presented with genuine choice and (2) I had the ability to dilate time. By breaking the routine of how I normally spend time, I feel at ease to think about long term goals or dormant anxiety that have been washed away in the noise of daily life. Being at home uncompromisingly forces me to confront both on a local and global scale the question of “what do I want to do with my time?”