Are you "at home"?
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When I moved out of Madison WI at the age of 33, I thought it was remarkable that I didn't feel so much as a twinge of sentimentality. I guess it helped that my whole family had already moved away anyway. It takes about a month of living in a place before it feels like home for me.
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@Horace said in Are you "at home"?:
It takes about a month of living in a place before it feels like home for me.
That's extremely quickly, but maybe we have a different understanding of "home".
I mean not merely being used to a new place, getting used to the house/apartment, where the local supermarket is etc.
I mean something deeper. In German, there's the word "Heimat", which does not seem to have an adequate translation.
It means something like: Feeling welcomed by the place and its people, feeling safe, feeling that one "belongs" there and nowhere else.
It may involve having many good local friends and/or having a special connection to the landscape/nature/... .Edit: I just see that there's even a Wikipedia page for the word "Heimat".
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I don’t know if this means anything but whenever I’m in New York I feel at home maybe because i grew up there and it’s never left me. I grew up in the heart of manhattan. Central Park was where I went to play after school.
I travelled around on the subways from a very early age.
Maybe because I’m there often enough nowadays.
Just sayin -
I personally haven't really felt at home anywhere since I left my parents home.
My father, on the other hand, was so deeply at home in the village he grew up and lived, you could have offered him a million $ to move 5 miles in any direction to the next village and he wouldn't have to think for a second to say "no".
I always feel kind of caught red-handed when I hear the old Bob Dylan song:
How does it feel, how does it feel?
To be on your own, with no direction home
A complete unknown, like a rolling stone -
When the team I was on was offered the choice between severance and moving to CA, I was the only one to move, because the rest of the team had family ties to the area. I'm glad I was able to cash in on the "cost of living" nonsense that allows people in high cost of living areas to save multiples more money than people in lower cost of living areas.
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I think home is where your heart is, but it can be other things too. I love very close to the town I grew up in, but that is purely by accident. I've lived quite a few places since then. I love it and I still have many friends there that I know from as far back as kindergarten.
But I also have an adopted hometown, which is where a lot of my heart lies. We were supposed to go there this weekend but my adopted mom is 90 now and she just wasn't up for guests.
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I've lived in the same town since 1980. This is "home" and probably more than the town I grew up in (though I was only there for 12 years).
Mrs. George and I traveled north of the Cheddar Curtain yesterday. Upon returning to our town, we both commented on how nice it was to be "home."
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@Klaus said in Are you "at home"?:
The place/village/city where you live - do you feel that that is where you belong? That this is your home?
Or it is fungible and you wouldn't mind much if you'd live elsewhere?
That was a big difference when we moved around 2020. Where we used to live housed our crap—that was it. Where we live now is not just a home but a neighborhood and a community. It's something I notice very strongly every time I'm driving back.
Then again, we looked around for a place just like this specifically for that reason.
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What a great question.
I grew up in Conneticut and would like to feel it's my home but it has changed so much. My real home is NYC. I lived in Greenwich Village, the Upper West Side and then Central Park South. I walked around Manhattan a lot and saw some interesting things (e.g. there's a small graveyard near the Bowery with a headstone of a guy named Preserved Fish,) and also drove around the other burroughs quite a bit too. I am something of a Flaneur.
I left NYC a while ago, and I'm glad I left. Florida is where I live now and I like it, but it's not my home.
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I would describe our town as upper-middle class. At least I think it is.
$120K median household income.
$422K median home value
$61% college educated.There's so much that's wonderful about it.
Designed by a world-class landscape architect
A remarkable diversity of home styles
12 miles from downtown Chicago.
A "Village in the Forest."There are many towns in my area that have better (?) demographics, nicer (?) homes. Few, however, have the charm of mine. If I had gotten bored with it, I would have moved. I didn't.
In the vast suburbia that is Chicago, it's unique.
ETA Where I've lived:
- Brooklyn (to age 5)
- Suburban Chicago town #1
- Downtown Chicago - Gold Coast
- Lincoln Park Chicago
- My current town.
"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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@George-K said in Are you "at home"?:
A "Village in the Forest."
Villa Silvanus? I think that's what you said they referred to it as, back in the day.
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@Klaus said in Are you "at home"?:
I mean not merely being used to a new place, getting used to the house/apartment, where the local supermarket is etc.
I mean something deeper. In German, there's the word "Heimat", which does not seem to have an adequate translation.
It means something like: Feeling welcomed by the place and its people, feeling safe, feeling that one "belongs" there and nowhere else.
It may involve having many good local friends and/or having a special connection to the landscape/nature/... .I would say I’ve never felt that. So for me it really is about getting comfortable with the new environment
I was born in Texas, a place where my family wasn’t ‘from’. We moved to Ohio for 7 years then Florida for 5 then upstate NY for 4 then 4 years of college in Indiana. Then I got my first real job in Chicago and really started traveling.
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I think I feel most at "home" back in Taiwan.
I think because of this:
Feeling welcomed by the place and its people, feeling safe, feeling that one "belongs" there and nowhere else.
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I still have a very strong emotional affiliation with South West PA. It’s where I was born, grew up, and a decent chance it’s where I’ll die. I like where I live now, and it is very much my current home, but I am still a ‘burgher.
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Emotional affiliation is a good way to put it @LuFins-Dad . Yes I feel at home now in Minnesota but it also helps that I expect to live here for the next 30+ years, raising my kids, retiring, etc.
I do have an emotional affiliation for where I spent the first 20 years of my life (in Annandale, Virginia), probably because we also didn't move around growing up so all my childhood memories are exploring the same streets, yards, and creeks. That being said, I'd probably feel MORE of an attachment to my childhood neighborhood if it was the same... but it has changed. In the 80s and 90s it was a community... the parades, the little league, the stores didn't change often, everyone spoke English, but now if I go back things are more crowded, run down a bit, and the majority of store signs are in a different language (mostly Korean).
