The sick of longing for being at “home”—homesickness, isn’t necessarily about home and neither is it exactly an illness, instead, it stems from our natural need of love, protection and security—a feelings and qualities usually associated with home, not literally just missing your house, but missing what’s normal, what is routine, the larger sense of social space, because those are the things that help us survive.
The common perception of home is where we belong, territorially, existentially and culturally, where our own community is, where our family and loved one reside, where we can identify our roots, and where we long to return to when we are elsewhere in the world.
In this sense, belonging is a notion filled with romantic images; it is a foundational. In the sense that it circumscribes feelings of “home ness” (as well as homesickness), it is also a significant determinant of identity, that elusive but still real psycho sociological state of being in relate with oneself under given external conditions. Most importantly, “home” and “belonging” are affectively a defined concept, the indicative “home is where we belong” really means, “home is where we feel we belong.”
People may find themselves living and breathing in their own home, their privileged community space, with people of “their own kind”, in more or less pronounced “ethnic purity”. But they may also find themselves elsewhere; in which case be-longing more often than not turns into a question of longing-to-be at home.
This fact of being on somewhere else far away from Nusantara, spending the most precious time of re-humanizing my self through the so-called “holiday” in this Baltic sea’s town side, reminds me to some partial scenes of mental condition from my rooted community that has produced images and memories, which often quite out of touch with contemporary realities of those authentic roots.
How could be a place you have never physically been to, but when you get there you just know this is where you belong? It is a place that your heart and your blood feel connected to. I began to realize that people, despite of their nationalities, also may feel they have several belongings, several places and cultures they belong to and that determine their identity as multiple, nested, situational or fluid. The features of a culture that produce this sense of closeness and well-being are within its folkways, its sounds and smells of traffic congestions, its consumerism behavior and worship towards automobiles, its viciousness into space occupations, its corner of the town hall’s square, the innumerable subtle and ways of life we grow up with—it makes the cultural belonging is very important, perhaps because it is basically so very simple: we feel we belong to our culture, because it constitutes a home of natural embeddedness and unthinking attachment, “familiarity”—familiar surroundings, close knit localities, or the intimacy of personal relationships.
