This is Home

“Home is where the heart is”. You’ve probably heard that phrase a trillion times. It means that no matter what, home is where you feel it is. If you move, for example, then after one or two days, you feel like your new house is home. But if you got forced to live somewhere, and never got to go back to your old house, there would always be a part of you saying: “This isn’t home. I want to go back.” Home isn’t just where the heart is. Home is where you choose it is. If, after being forced to live in a home that wasn’t yours, you were released back into your normal living space, you would feel that you just got back home. You chose to live here. And a home doesn’t have to be a house, either. It can be an apartment, a rental, a cabin, a tent, and maybe even nothing physical at all. Either way, you know where it is. Except, although many people don’t, we can all agree that it’s pretty darn nice to have a house. Imagine this: an alien race discovers earth, and before proper contact with humans, notices the sheer amount of people without homes. These aliens would probably just assume that owning a home is not a necessity for humans on earth. That’s not okay. If you’re skeptical about this analogy, imagine you saw a planet full of a thriving species, but most did not have shelter. Same thing. There are, to date, more than 235,000 homeless people in Canada alone. That’s about 150 million people on earth. The worst part is that most of us actually take a physical house for granted. It’s almost philosophical, in a way, that not many homes are physical, but nonetheless are homes.