It’s seems ironic that wherever I am not, that’s where I call home. A month ago I was calling Australia home and when I got here and start talking to people about Switzerland, I find I’m calling there home! I did a double take in my own thinking the first time I did it.
I think I’ve cheated myself for a year. For a year (that’s the prescription I was given by everyone) I’ve taken my time to settle in and it’s really only in the last few months that I began to feel ‘at home’ in Switzerland. Everyone you talk to who has ever moved across the globe or across the state tells you “It takes a year for you to settle in.” And so it has. But now the predicament is that I’ve come home to find that what I thought was ‘home’ is not ‘home’ at all. And I think about the times when I told myself ‘Can’t wait to get home.” But what a cheat! And it finally dawns on me (slow learner) that I could have dealt with ‘whatever’ it was bothering me, then and there, rather than thinking a change of location was going to help. Sure, I’ve climbed some pretty high mountains this year (physically and metaphysically) but I could have been wiser and kinder to myself! But now I know, I mean I really know.
Part of my problem in being away (and don’t get me wrong, it’s been an absolutely fantastic year) has been my false belief of feeling responsible for others. I’ve thought at times that I should really be around to support my family. But I come home and my family are doing just fine thank you very much. Maybe for a while there I thought I was God or something and that I had to be there for everyone! *he he*. But now I see that everyone’s fine, they still love me, I still love them and they don’t really need me here at all. And I see that God’s doing a great job without me actually.
And so, we returned ‘home’ to our hometown to find it so far away from everything, so far removed from everything and it was doing my head in. “What can I possibly do from here?” I was thinking to myself. “I can’t live here anymore”. And so it was... It’s a spinner, this not really knowing where your physical location of home is. It’s driving me underground to find a deeper meaning of home. It seems like an ongoing pilgrimage that I keep returning to time and time again in my life. I’ve learnt, through my study of Christian Science that home is not a physical location, it’s more a combination of qualities like warmth, love, comfort, light etc that is within. Things you can’t see. But there’s seems to be this deeper yearning in me to have a home and I don’t even know what that really means yet. The meaning of it keeps changing for me. We’ve rented our ‘house’/‘home’ out for two years and we went to see it the other day. I kept waiting for something to “kick in” to say “Yes, this is your home” but it didn’t happen. I’ve kept waiting for that “this is it” moment for the last three weeks and....nothing. The closest I got to it was going for a walk in Noosa National Park along the ocean path. But I know they don’t sell houses in a National Park so I don’t know what that was all about *ha ha*.
I’ve been fighting all year against the idea that we could possibly live overseas and call that home. I haven’t wanted it to be. Not because it’s not absolutely fantastic over there...it is...but because it goes against all my notions of what I thought ‘home’ was. I’ve been so patriotically Australian (when I’m not in Australia that is) that I couldn’t possibly conceive of it. A great friend from church who just returned to Australia from overseas told me the same thing when I told him I keep calling Switzerland ‘home’ now, but I wasn’t when I was there, I was calling Australia ‘home’. He said he did the same and it was a curious thing!
And now I find that the Paddington Bear from London and the sheep chess set from Wales that I bought ‘home’ with me to Australia (so that I wouldn’t have excess baggage later on) are now actually going to be coming ‘home’ with me back to Switzerland. That’s telling.
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