Ambivalent Reflections on "Home"

 I was recently speaking to a friend of mine who was considering going back to the UK. We both considered the pros and cons and what "home" actually meant to us. We've both been away from the UK now for more than 18 years, so any memories that I may have of life in the UK are pretty mixed. Like many who head to the horizon looking for something, I was probably looking for something that was inside me, as in the incredible journey told in “meetings with extraordinary men” by Gurdijev.

This led us to question the motives as to why one goes away and what one is looking for. I found some interesting reflections in Greg Madison’s book The End of Belonging that I would like to share. 

I think about returning home almost every day. Sometimes I am clear that I would never return, sometimes I fantasise about it, yet other times I feel a dull homesickness, a kind of pull to the only place that could have been home but never really was. I think this signifies a desire for a kind of spiritual and psychological reconnection, a healing of the self in some way, a reconciliation where originally there was mutual rejection. 

Return would be a complex process necessitating a melancholic recognition of time: home did not freeze the day I went through the departure gate. Home has changed, though deeply familiar it is also different, and I would return as a stranger in a strangely familiar land. But again, how could I stay and not succumb to the suffocation that led me to leave in the first place? How could I protect my fluid self, elaborated by all my experiences in the world, and withstand the sustained demand to cement into sameness? How can I balance my desire for home with my need for self-direction? Any feeling of being at-home is now forever tinged with feeling not-at-home; the two come inextricably intertwined. Homesickness is a given, not a demand to return home, where the feeling paradoxically continues unabated.

“Is the existential migrant an existential hero or is she or he lost in the dilemma of perpetuating the condition that they are trying to address?” I would say probably a bit of both

Do migrants suffer from a type of cultural schizophrenia? Certainly.