“Home”

By Georganna Ulary, philosophy faculty at Marist College

Ciao a tutti! Greetings from Tivoli, New York. I hope this finds you all safe and healthy. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m on the philosophy faculty at the Marist Poughkeepsie campus but I spent the Fall 2019 semester (as well as Fall 2017) on the Florence campus teaching the First-Year Seminar to FFE and incoming BA students. Within philosophy, my main focus is on 19^th & 20^th century German and French Philosophy, and the questions I’m most interested in are of an existential, social and political nature.

These are certainly strange and uncertain times we’re living through, and given the limited scope of what we are permitted to do, our current situation has given me a lot to reflect on, and to try to make sense of. As much as I have agreed with them, the stay-at-home and social distancing orders run counter in almost every way to how we’re used to living our lives – where we’re hardly ever at home and where we’re usually out among other people. “Being at home” has come to take on new meaning for me, as I’m sure it has for you too. This time spent “staying at home” has made me more attuned to the way I usually relate to others, to nature, to technology, and to myself. I thought I’d share with you some of my philosophical and personal musings about “home”: what is home, what does it is mean, and why/how is it so important? is there a difference between “staying home” and “being at home”? How can we feel “at home” in a world where we are socially distant?

As students, your lives have been largely defined by your relation to home: many of you often leave home to go to college, you return home for summers and holidays; sometimes you continue to live at home after you graduate; you travel around the world, leaving home on various journeys; your independence is, in part, measured by the degree to which you’ve separated from, or ventured out from your childhood home and experience.  Home is fundamentally important for all of us, even though as an idea “home” remains ambiguous. First, I don’t believe that “being at home” is merely a state; it is as much a kind of activity as traveling and working are activities; it is as much a mood as ennui is. To complicate the ambiguity further, although “home” typically conjures images of warmth, safety, protection, comfort, sacredness, family, privacy, and intimacy, it has also become apparent that not everyone’s home provides this comfort or protection. There are people for whom their home is a threat to their very existence (think of those in situations of domestic violence). There are also the hundreds of thousands of homeless people. Moreover, home can mean different things: it can mean the fixed place where you reside (a house), but it can also mean your place of birth, your country, where you come from or where you go. “Home” is connected to all of these and more: it is about the physical place you live, it is about your bodily well-being, it is about your psychosocial well-being, and about your relationships to the natural environment, to other human beings, to yourself, and to technology; it is also about the moods you experience in these various relationships. Feeling “at home” is a deeply complex and fundamental aspect of our existence as human beings, as “dwellers.” Over the last two months I’ve been more keenly attuned to all these different senses of what home is and what it might mean. Personally, I’ve taken more notice of the gift of being at home, the simple pleasures of everyday work and perception. One of the things that stands out to me most is that “being at home” means more than concretely “staying at home” (at this house, on this street, in this village, etc.) – even while recognizing all of this as important. For me, ‘being at home’ is an activity, in contrast to ‘staying at home’ which seems more like an immobile passive state that leads to boredom and isolation. Being at home is not fundamentally different from being in the world – it means being with others, reaching out to others, caring for/about, engaging with, responding to, cultivating, tending, listening, sensing, walking, cooking, nourishing, creating, playing, slowing down and opening up. I feel very fortunate to be able to experience this gift of being home, especially in light of the fact that there are so many people around the world who are experiencing homelessness, alienation, and loneliness.

At the same time, I also recognize that staying home and social distancing is experienced as a real hardship for many others – especially for those whose everyday existence depends on going outside of home to work in order to maintain their bare life. I realize that it is also a minor annoyance for those who find home boring, tedious, depressing, and lonely. Staying at home and being at home both run against the cultural demand made on us by consumer society to go out, to buy, to spend, to consume, etc., as if these are the most human ways of being in the world. But there are other ways of being in the world and this time at home brings them into relief a bit more than usual.  For me, “being at home” has made me more aware and engaged in everyday practices like listening, walking, gardening, cooking, and reading which offer me the chance to revalue my relationships to others, to the landscape, to the environment and nature, to my social and political community, and to technology. I’ve found it comforting, therapeutic and edifying to just “be”, to just look and listen (without expectations), to just walk (without a specific destination), to garden, to cook, to read, to play games. I try to pay attention to the myriad things that I usually pass by without registering any recognition of them, so busy to get on with life as normal. In the process of doing all this, I oddly feel more connected to my landscape and to the people I care about than I have in a very long time.

Wishing you all the best, and hoping that in being at home you, too can find some joy.