Where is home?: February 03, 1997 issue of New Thinking

February 03, 1997 New Thinking:
Where is home?

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February 03, 1997

Where is home?

By Gerry McGovern

Home is where the body is, the body containing the heart and the mind.

Not just quite that way anymore. The mind is like a cat. It leaves its body-home, to travel and investigate, to return sometime later. On the Internet and out in cyberspace, the mind has perhaps found its home-from-home. Perhaps even a new home.

Home means a lot to a lot of people. Like roots to a tree, a lot of us have a need to be rooted to one place. Brid, my partner’s sister spent 35 years as a nun in Australia and has just come home for good. She talked to me about practically all the sisters she knew from many different countries in the world. All had some sort of longing to go back home.

You ask an Irish person where they are from and they will almost always name the place they were born. Americans I’ve asked invariably told me the city or state they were living in at that point in time.

Why are most Africans black? Why do the Chinese look different from the Russians? Why do so many Germans have blond hair? Why is it only the Irish who seem to have red hair? And how come the world has so many languages?

I think that a lot of the differences between peoples have to do with physical geography, with place, but more particularly, with the length of time a group of people have lived, died and loved in one place. I think that over thousands of years, we grew into the land, took on its features, spoke like the mountains, and sang in harmony with the valleys.

Cyberspace is a new space and it has no room for the body. The body is left on the chair and the mind goes out to dance on the wire. Such thinking sends a shudder through us now, but I wonder how normal it will be to our children and their children.

Home is a place where habit meets habit. Home is a place you spend a long time in. Home is a place where you know that you belong.

We usually only have one real home. But in these transition years, we may find that we have one home out on the wire and one back at the fire. Or we may have several. And that is what I worry about.

The body is a defined thing. We know pretty well how much space it takes up. The mind is an inner-outer-space. It spreads. Given half-a-chance, it can dream an infinite, flowing whirl of things. The mind is liable to split. Without the body, the cat is out of the bag for good.

It is perhaps not our children, but certainly their children, who will face the questions of where truly is home? Or, how many homes can you have before home loses its essential pull?

And if the world becomes ‘homeless’, won’t it also become a very volatile place? And our bodies, what ultimately of them in the digital age? Will we continue to live longer, as we are slowly drained of our physical vigor and strength? Will it be a great irony to say that while modern life has made us physically healthier, modern life has made us weak in body?

Gerry McGovern

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It is perhaps not our children, but certainly their children, who will face the questions of where truly is home?