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I recently bought a book on a whim from Borders: Socrates Café (which is strange for me, because I hardly ever buy books, much less on whims, much less from bookstores). I must say that I’m glad I picked it up. It’s not the prose or the subject matter (philosophy) that are revolutionary or interesting, but rather the treatment of the subject and its applicability to everyday life.

While reading the author, Chris Phillips’s stories of his philisophical encounters, I came upon a question that I have myself considered before: What is home? My brain warmed up its contextual similarities engine and quickly churned out a memory of a scene from Garden State, admittedly my favorite movie, in which Zach Braff introduces a bit of philosophy when he talks about a possible theory of what “home” is.

You’ll see when you move out it just sort of happens one day and it’s just gone. And you can never get it back. It’s like you get homesick for a place that doesn’t exist. I mean it’s like this rite of passage, you know. You won’t have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for your kids, for the family you start, it’s like a cycle or something. I miss the idea of it. Maybe that’s all family really is — a group of people who miss the same imaginary place.

Garden State, 2004

I think this mostly fits my own conception and covers the most general case, but as Phillips points out, there are special cases where people come from orphanages or some other different background that they don’t call “home”. It seems that “family” can be taken in two ways here: the family you grew up with (mom, dad, siblings) and the family you start yourself (spouse, children). Maybe the orphans don’t have the former, but can have the latter and thus a notion of home. What of the people that have neither type of family? Are they, in the broad and philosophical sense of the word, homeless?

I know that I’ve been missing the feeling of having a home since I moved out when I was 17. I have an apartment that I live in and I go back to visit my mom’s house and my dad’s house, but there is no home anywhere for me. I feel almost eager to settle down and make a new home for myself and those that I love. It’s some sort of nesting instinct or something (or does that only apply to females?). All that I know is that my ideal home has been gone for some time now and I’m hoping I’ll regain that feeling when I do settle down, following Zach Braff’s idea of how the cycle will continue.

I wonder also if things have always been this way. Three thousand years ago did people still have the same sort of feelings toward a home? Looking to the future, is the notion of a home threatened by our society’s advancement? Will the ties to the home be weaker or stronger in a hundred years? Does the concept of the home tie in somehow with the meaning of life? If so, how big of a part does it play? Would that help explain orphans that become criminals or deadbeats? These are interesting questions and, as Phillips says, something to think about.