Where the heart is, apparently.

Herman Melville once wrote that life is a voyage that is homeward bound. The question is, where is home? What is home? How does one define home? The place where you grew up? Where you live? The people with whom you feel safe? Heaven? Or is it more esoteric? Another one of those ‘common sense’ concepts that everyone understands but no one can really put a finger on?

For the lack of a better descriptor, I tend to refer to Singapore as ‘home’, but is it really? The past few years have deepened that gulf. I have never had any great love for Singapore, its cloying humidity; its unbending regulations; its forced conscription; its subversive national education programmes; and most jarringly, the mindset and temerity of its people.

Friends aside, there really isn’t anything that I truly miss. Even the food which so many expatriate students hanker after doesn’t quite call me anymore. Singapore stifles me, and it’s easier to define my Singaporean-ness by what I am not, rather than what I am.

But what if home isn’t a place? What if home is an ideal? What then?

Maybe home is a state of mind which you carry around with you. Maybe that state of mind is facilitated by the people around you, guided not by nostalgic feeling or geography or ethnic roots but by love and understanding.

Love and understanding. That’s something to work towards.

I leave for Singapore on Friday. I suppose I’m not really going home, am I? It’s more on the nature of a holiday. A holiday where I meet a lot of old friends. That’s a nice thought.