A house is not a home?

 What is home?

I just had such a deep conversation with three other people who are coming from different places, have different first languages, and even have different aesthetics about the concept of (home).

The first person was born in West Africa but his family migrated to the US so he lived there for a very long time and did almost most of his education in the US. I asked him "Do you feel at home in the US?"

I thought this is just a manifestation of the identity and belonging crisis you go through when are an immigrant or a child of immagrant. But, he answered " I don't even know if I have a feeling of home anywhere in the world since I have been traveling a lot lately"

( do I feel at home in my little apartment that I occupied for a little less than a year now? I was asking myself while he was talking, would I feel at home at some point even if not now? what about my room with those windows facing our big yard in Sudan? what about my grandparent's house? that small dirty street I have been wandering around all my childhood? can you have two homes? three homes? One main home and other many homes? )

Then I asked our second friend (India) who has been studying in the US for more than 6 years if this amount of time was enough to develop a sense of home-ness? His answer was exactly the same " I am not sure anymore what home means" he answered. He continued that being in academia, traveling from one place to another teaches you to survive through, but never integrate. what is home? I am not sure anymore. You belong to an intellectual space, people, and thoughts, but they are no longer attached to a place.

The really interesting part was the third American woman who jumped in " I have been asking myself what is home for a long time now ". (That wasn't expected for sure.)

She is an American who lived her whole life in one country, never had to leave for education or work. She traveled within that country for sure but never had to endure a big change in culture, language, and social norms. Nevertheless, she undergoes a feeling of "homelessness" sometimes.

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For someone to whom belonging was always materialistic, I couldn't imagine a reality where you belong to some sort of social group that is not closely linked to a place.

Identity and belonging and home were always interchangeable in my mind and they always meant a place, walls, chairs, streets, food, clothes, language, architecture, something so materialistic and tangible. But there are obviously people in this world who successfully (?) transcended all of this and found peace in belonging to something less grounded in the physical world ( did they actually find peace? not sure, seems like they still have a lot of debate going on in their minds, but, has there lived a human who hasn't had that in history? )

Anyway, this is also related to the current situation we are all experiencing nowadays, Losing home. Being forced to lose home is not even like leaving willingly, but the internal psychological conflict might be similar. Different paths, the same end. Not sure if this is going somewhere specific, but it was definitely a bittersweet conversation that you don't get to have that much these days. Having shared this feeling with people who I once thought are so different from me, and rarely sharing it with people who I have always thought of as more like me, makes me question the same thing I started with (home and belonging) to a place.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3kEQQgMM-E