Home sweet home - that I left
“A man travels the world in search of what he needs and returns home to find it” - this quote by novelist and poet George Moore is one of my all-time favorites. I first read it when I boarded a plane to fly from Iceland to Canada for a short exchange in high school. From that moment on I have lived and practiced this quite religiously and I try to take each travel, each adventure as a learning experience. I used to interpret it in a way that what you truly need is already what you have at home, and sometimes you need to go far to see what’s right in front of you — to appreciate home more.
After traveling many times to different places after the trip to Canada, and living abroad in Barcelona, I’ve changed my judgment of the quote into that as you travel and experience - you learn. You learn things about yourself, others, the world, and life, that you wouldn’t necessarily learn at home. If you’re lucky, you return home to realize you found what you needed to learn and then you can live your life with a more open mind. However, in many cases, this isn’t what happens. And that’s why most (I assume) never fully return home after they’ve left.
It’s simply not a home no more.
On the 15th of June, I had packed my bags, took a taxi to the airport, and left Barcelona to come home to Finland. I’d like to say this was a carefully orchestrated plan all along, but that’s not the case — it was actually a spontaneous thought I said out loud a second after I first had it at a dinner party. From then I thought about it for a week and it almost ate up my mind while from the first moment on I knew it would be the best thing to do.
My life in Barcelona has been amazing, but has also been full of chaos and despair. I always knew I wouldn’t stay there forever and therefore I was always open to the idea of leaving, but I didn’t expect that moment to come so soon and that the next destination would be Finland. After a week of sitting on the thought of whether to stay or leave, I decided to take the jump. But instead of flying through the air, it feels more like crawling back to the nest I once left.
And I don’t yet know if I will return to Barcelona.
As I spent the last weeks of Barcelona life, everyone around me kept asking me how I felt (which by the way I think we don’t ask each other often enough unless there is something seemingly dramatic happening) and the honest answer is that I still don’t know if I feel anything, yet I feel everything at once: the happiness of coming home and being in my family’s presence, the joy of meeting my old friends again, peace of knowing I’ll be in the middle of nature again after a long time, the sadness of leaving such an amazing place like Barcelona behind, fear of losing the new connections I’ve made here and the people I’ve been happy to meet, and last but not least — the uncertainty of what’s to come.
If you’re someone who has lived abroad, you know it’s not always easy to return home. Not only because of the growth you’ve made, and maybe you no longer have a place at home, but also because of having had such an amazing time that you never want to forget.
And if you’re someone who’s planning to live abroad at some point please be aware that this is a consequence you’ll have to live with. You don’t necessarily truly belong to where you move to, yet your old home doesn’t feel like “home” anymore.
My loved ones have been telling me how courageous it is of me to come back home, and I do perceive it in such a way: to me, it feels like coming back even for an undetermined amount of time took almost more or at least as much courage as it took to leave. But I think that’s what life is about, you need to put yourself out of your comfort zone whether it means going forward or backward. Sometimes a step back can only mean an opportunity to reset and reflect (which is what it is in my case) and it can even be necessary in order to move forward again. Sometimes it brings us discomfort to step forward to the unknown but that is also a step with might just have to take since everything in life is uncertain and unpredictable up to a certain degree.
I was planning to post this blog as I was flying somewhere over Germany or the Baltics to come home — one or two mental breakdowns later ready to take my lungs full of that fresh and clean Nordic summer air. However, the last days went by in a haze and so it is that it’s already the third full day of being at home here in Finland. And it’s beautiful, it feels good and terrible at the same time. But the good feeling wins so far and I’m ready to feast with every single moment of being here.
with love, Stiina