I used to blame people and circumstances, but I think this burning question has never let me relax anywhere and perhaps I invited those circumstances. I don’t think it is about having a physical piece of space and owning it. Is it because we often confuse a house for a home?
I understand a house serves the purpose of shelter and other societal norms. By Mother’s Grace, I have been around loving people and I have experienced all comforts …but what is a home really? As you can see, I am going around in circles!
A home, as in a typical family, is the first contact and schooling in collective life. The second step is the national life and the third is the world as one family and one home.
In the first schooling lesson, we have persons, parents and family, where we learn the basic lesson of giving and sharing. But here we learn the lesson under very controlled circumstances of those connected to our physical circumstances and birth.
But as we develop, we begin to associate with ‘like-minded’ persons or people with affinity and feel at home with them. In fact, as we develop psychologically, we may develop along different lines from our other family members, from the family of birth. We learn to adapt to different outer circumstances and even outer habits as long as there is an inner affinity. This is our psychological home. Its widest reach is when we are able to live together as one family in a common national life with common issues, a common history, common larger aims of the group life to which we contribute and which nourishes us in return.
The last step is the life of humanity where we are at home everywhere tied by the thread of a common human existence with the world itself as our home.
Very few reach this point. But once we arrive here, we need to go further, especially as we discover the spiritual life, which is the beginning of a life beyond the human framework. Then we join and are at home in a humanity linked together in a common uplifting ideal and spiritual aspiration. The name of this home is a commune. These are the four strides of the Divine in us, taking us towards our highest possibility wherein we become the home to a number of diverse creatures- human, animal and otherwise and we too are at home in every surrounding and circumstance because we dwell in the Divine and find Him everywhere and in everyone.
Affectionately,
Alok Da
