I’ve been setting up a home in Malaysia for most of this year, yesterday my shipment arrived from England and this apartment is starting to feel more like ‘our place’. Lately, whenever anyone asks me how I feel, ‘a little bit homesick for home’ is my reply! When I was about 11 I went to stay at my cousins in Denby Dale, 8 miles from Barnsley for a week school holidays. My (younger) cousin Tina, had to bring me home on the bus after 3 nights because I was so homesick! Now 40 something years later and literally thousands and thousands of miles travelled later, I still can feel those same twinges of feeling homesick, that part of me is missing.
Samuel Johnson says ‘to be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition’. A wise saying which makes me think ‘home’ is the reason we went overseas in the first place, to save enough for a deposit on a home, no different to the dilemma facing young people today. Its the reason we work so hard, to be happy at home. But we are never at home – in body, in mind, in spirit – because we are always working. So why are we working so hard? To be happy at home.
Home is where the heart is, so I’m great at making a lovely home wherever I live. Perhaps ‘homesickness’, isn’t a longing for the green fields and peace of our beloved Yorkshire, perhaps its a longing to find that ‘result of all ambition’, a feeling of being connected, in mind, in body, in spirit, wherever in the world we find ourselves.
