Where is your home?

By Lisa Seppala, MBA, BComm, ACC, PHS (Adv Cert)

There is a saying, ‘home is a state of mind’, and now I understand its meaning.

Recently I took a week off work and travelled to my hometown. My solo journey consisted of air and road travel with stops along the way to visit family and friends.

My reasons for this ‘pilgrimage’ were many – attending my godfather’s celebration of life, supporting my lifelong friend and her brother with the recent passing of their father and a flooded cabin, spending time with my sisters-in-law and friends from my childhood and university days, paying my respects to my parents’ grave, and visiting my family’s cottage where I spent much of my youth.

While initially, I felt I was going ‘home’ to where I was born, this trip made me realize that my home is not just one physical location, but several, and also a feeling of memory and belonging.

My home is:

• Where I currently work and live with my husband and dog, near many of our friends;
• In a metropolitan city where I lived, learned, and worked for decades, including the airport where I was ‘in-transit’ during my journey;
• In the city where I completed high school and my first degree and where my sisters-in-law and some university friends still live;
• In the town where my mother and father-in-law once lived;
• In the town where I was born, lived, and worked, where my parents rest in the cemetery and many friends still live;
• At the lake where our family cottage and my friends’ cottages are located. Where so many people from my childhood still spend their time and fondly remember my family;
• In the people I have known through my varied work life that I happened to run into during my travels; and,
• In the beauty of islands on a lake, wide open spaces, prairie skies, snow-covered mountains, cities, the ocean, and the familiar chords from an impromptu jam session.

In short, my home is within my grounded self, in the connections I have to the people and landscape of Canada and everything and everyone who contributed to who I am today.

Where is your home?