Each of us needs to feel at home to be well. The concept of “home” is intimately linked to a spiritual state of well-being.

To feel protected, to feel welcomed, to feel understood, to feel free to be who we intimately feel we are, to feel oneself in essence, to feel authentic; to connect with the harmonious universe, with thought, with memories, with hope for the future, with one’s roots; to get rid of fears, of appearance, of complacency, of defensive armor.

Simply being. This means home; a place (not necessarily physical) where metaphorically, once you close the door and let out a sigh to get rid of your worries, you undress leaving behind everything that is not being.

My life forced me to firmly cultivate the concept of home so that I could always create for myself the stable balance point in an environment of constant change and instability.

With 19 years old, I put 600km distance with what had been the only home since I was born; at a time when 600km needed almost 12 hours to be traveled by the then available public transportation. At 25, another 500km was added and at 35 another 1000km. Not to mention all the thousands of kilometers I traveled for work that kept me away from my place of reference for long periods of time over the years: many places in Europe, though also Latin America, the United States, Asia, Australia.

But it is not only the miles that make you feel far from home; it is above all the lack of points of reference; the fact of being here today and somewhere else tomorrow; the need to constantly put yourself on the line; the effort to be accepted in the new social context; new rules, new expectations, new demands; the need to make a home for yourself in order to feel good.

If in all this whirlwind living, I had believed that the concept of home was solely the place where my family physically resided, I believe I would never have been able to live with serene curiosity the experiences that life offered me away from home. I would have done so with many regrets, with the idea, when I was happy and enjoying those moments, that I was stealing something from someone, with the conviction that I was being selfish; or when I was depressed about being away from home, with unhealthy nostalgia and with regrets about the decisions I made.

I learned early on that “home” can be a little corner one builds for oneself in the most anonymous of hotels; it is the smile of the barman at the café downstairs where I used to go for breakfast in my new city of residence; it is a person I can rely on; it is a song I hear playing in the distance amid the chaos of my host city; it is the smell of good coffee coming in through the window of my college student room; it is the understanding look of a saleswoman who feels that you are far from home; it is a phone call with your wife in which the words reveal a fusion of intentions and perspectives; it is a conversation or a hug with a person whom you intuit is on your same wavelength; it is the short chats exchanged with a neighbor who lives a life similar to the one I would have lived if I had stayed at my parents’ house; it is the simplicity of a walk in a forest on a sunny day or a foggy one where the silence sends you a sweet message of harmony and hope; it is the pure love of a child who asks nothing but to be with his/her father to be happy. Home is thus something intangible that everyone perceives as the place where feeling and living are the same thing.

One day I felt at home in Prague, on Christmas night 1989 under a freezing sky, listening to an improvised choir of four green-eyed girls, whose voices exuded freedom and the hope of a future to be built with their own hands (the Berlin Wall had just fallen). On that occasion I wrote this short poem which, rereading it today, after more than 30 years, continues to make me feel at home.

Immergersi nudi                               Diving nacked

nell’essenza della semplicitá          in the essence of simplicity

lasciando l’apparire                          leaving the appearance

come un vestito sgualcito               like a creased dress

sulla sedia dell’ipocrisia                  on the chair of hypocrisy

I feel at home even when, in the summer, after lunch at my mother’s house, everyone went for a nap and I found myself in a sudden silence, wandering around the house, careful not to make any noise, simply to try the taste of to see, that “everything was in order”, as always: certain objects in certain places, all the people sleeping peacefully, the noises of the usual house that emerge only in the silence… and I thought about how beautiful I was in that moment and who knows, I couldn’t have asked for more to be even happier.

“Home” is felt in the stomach, as well as in the heart and this is why we yearn to return whenever we can. Returning…returning is the answer to our anxieties. Knowing where this “home” is the best comfort in dark moments, and this is learned especially after understanding what is not home.

Home is where we feel human in all our fragility, all our imperfection and with all our doubts, without the fear of being despised or set apart for being so. Building a little corner where you feel at home requires objects but above all the presence (not necessarily physical) of other people.

I consider myself very lucky to have imbued my being with this need to build a home where I lived to feel good; I consider myself even luckier for having people around me who helped me to make it happen. …and for you, what does “home” mean?