Every once in a while I get confused about where home is. I’m in a transition between my school, the house I lived in all summer, and the house I grew up in.
If home is where the heart is, I guess the trouble really starts when I don’t know where my heart is.
I definitely love college. It is a place that is full of learning, loving, pain, passion, humanity, and humor. I am becoming more and more excited about going back there. But as I look back at my time in Silverdale and Sedro-Woolley, I am again reminded of college’s strange idiosyncrasies.
College community is one of the most important and meaningful parts of the entire experience. It is so great to go down a hall full of people willing to have conversations about everything from metaphysics to music to pasta. It seems so singular and particular, that I can’t help but hope that there is a way to continue such deep community outside the corridors of college.
But, as much as I look forward to community, I am also leery of “collegiate wisdom” that is too sectional to be applied to the whole of life. College students seem to vacillate between one of two extremes: The belief that they know everything or that they know nothing at all.
A staunch adherence to either of these extremes pushes you away from other people, true passion, and anything beautiful and nuanced. That’s one concept that I want to pursue more fully in my next semester: Nuance.
The pursuit of truth and beauty is absolutely vital … but I’ve become more and more inclined to think that a blunt, traumatic, or undiscerning search can be more destructive than useful in that quest.
There are so many causes and movements at my school that I sometimes wonder how they all fit together. There are idealists … but my idealism comes in the particular quest of unified and holistic knowledge and truth. College is an important place. All the ideas and people there are also important.
It is equally important to know how it all fits. How it all connects to life in general. There is nothing more useless than facts unconnected to greater ideas and ideals.
So I’m still figuring out what it means to go from one home to another. But there is one thing about which I am very certain:
This whole existence on planet earth is my home.
Two songs popped in my head:
One is out of the hymn book of the church in which I grew up: “This world is not my home I’m just passing through my treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue – the angels beckoned me from heaven’s open door and I can’t feel at home in this world anymore.”
The other is from a song by Matthew Price called “Home is Where the Van Breaks down:” “Some say home, that’s where the heart is, but my home is anywhere I park it.”
It was a monumental moment when I realized I saw Salem as home over Montana. It’s bittersweet. We have to leave people we love in either situation, but it gives us a reason to travel and visit all places that my have once been considered, “home.”