Home Is Where the Pillow Feels Right

Turns out, home isn’t a place—it’s who tucks you in at night.

When we were recently travelling we kept moving and changing our stays every 3-4 days. Now we knew we wanted to experience different cultures and environments and be in different places, only to return to our home, which we have rented in a city we live in (not to forget that belong’t belong to this city, yet).

In all of this moving rooms or stays, our kid would always say, at the end of the day, ‘Let's go home,’ and what she would mean was not the home we had rented in the city we live in but the one we were currently staying in.

I found it interesting that she immediately calls the place home as long as she has a comfortable bed and her parents are around. I am sure if we were to spend a night in the car, she would also call that car her home.

Why I like the way she thinks is not because she has shown the trust in me as a parent to call it home when she is around us and nobody else, but that she being a kid, no malice in her mind yet, thinks purely from first principles.

For first principles, the people with whom you are and nobody is around, and feel safe with are the home for you. Its not the bungalow with a big lawn or a 10x10 apartment.

My kid taught me the first principle of thinking about what a home is.

“The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.”
— Maya Angelou