Home is a pregnant pause & expat ‘um’
Posted by Lee-Anne Ragan | Filed under Diversity & culture, Travel
Kenya is my new home. I’ve moved here after living my entire life in Canada. I find myself asking people, on a regular basis, where’s home?
If you’ve lived overseas for any length of time you’ll understand the pregnant pause that happens when you ask someone where’s home?
A few ums are thrown in for good measure. The um is what the Shah brothers, authors of Club Expat – A teenager’s guide to moving overseas, call the expat um. A slight frown tends to furrow their brow. Silence ensues.
These are all sure signs that you’ve met someone who has spent a good deal of their time away from the place they were born.
It got me thinking about home. Some people spend a lifetime searching for it. Some, like ET travel very, very far to find it after they’ve lost it.
Your home brings to a distinct perspective to your life.
Is home where you are at the moment (whether or not you’re on vacation)?
Is home where you were born?
Is home where your family is?
Is home where you feel the best match to your culture(s)?
Is home a place or a feeling or a combination of both?
~~TGIF- each Friday I rejig & re-post a blog entry from my www.life-lenses.com blog, which is about enhancing our perspective & worldview.~~
October 12th, 2013 at 8:53 am
Living in Nunavut, although it is officially part of Canada, brings similar feelings to those of us who are not Inuit or Arctic-raised – and unspoken categorisation of people who come from “the south” as economic tourists or people who really live here, people who love the north and hunting and feel at home here, and people who live here longterm but always feel displaced.
Regardless of my current location, I’m finding home kind of a nostalgic concept in these strange times. For me, home has something to do with being able to plant a tree and know that it will still be there 30 or 300 years later. Who can do that anymore? Or home is where friends are, and the kids those friends are raising. But people don’t stay put, either. How is a person from a pastoral culture to learn from nomads and people of the road, to be at home everywhere? Or for a person who grew up on the coast, maybe kelp can teach how to be rooted in the movement of tides and storms.
October 16th, 2013 at 8:00 am
It’s a long way from our times in Calcutta hey?! LOVE the notion of taking lessons from kelp. How very west coast yet transferable.