Where Is Home?

To my friend Helmut Schütte,

You once asked me a simple question. Knowing you to be a man who has lived and worked in more countries than most of us will ever visit, I was quite certain that you did not ask it casually.

“Where is home?”

It should be a simple question. For most of my life it probably would have been. You grow up somewhere, you move, you settle, and eventually you point to a place on a map and say: there.

But you recall that I hesitated. I couldn’t give you an answer. Not because there’s a right or wrong answer. More because the question touched what Maya Angelou once called the ache for home that lives in all of us. And I realised, in that moment, that while I could feel the ache, I wasn’t sure where it was pointing.

The problem

You see, Helmut, I was born in London. I lived for a while in Oxfordshire. I spent a year in France. I lived in Sydney for fifteen years and became a citizen. For the past eight years, I have lived in Singapore.

We carry a simple assumption through most of life: home is where you’re from. Or where your family is. Or where you eventually find yourself with a front door and a mortgage. But the assumption starts to strain when your parents live in London, your grown-up children are building their lives in Sydney, and your partner is in Singapore. Where am I from exactly?

I go back to where I grew up and it feels familiar, but not quite mine anymore. I’ve built a life in Singapore, and I love this place, but a part of me still feels like a visitor at times. I’ve lived enough of myself in different places that each one holds a version of me. None of them seem to hold all of me.

George Moore wrote that “a man travels the world over in search of what he needs, and returns home to find it.” It’s a clean and reassuring idea. But for many of us, the place we might return to isn’t quite there anymore. Or we’re not the same person who left it.

So maybe the question isn’t where I’m from, it’s where I belong.

Earlier in life, that distinction felt easy to avoid. Work does most of the deciding. Opportunities appear, we follow them. Movement feels like progress. We don’t need a settled sense of place, because our sense of direction comes from somewhere else.

But things change. Work slows, or at least it stops being the centre of everything. The forces that once pulled us in certain directions begin to lose their grip. Gradually, we find ourselves with more choice than we’ve ever had, and less external structure telling us what to do with it.

When no one else is deciding where I should be, I get to decide. And that’s when the question of home resurfaces, with more weight behind it than it used to carry.

False gods

The natural response is to treat it as a problem to be solved. Cost of living. Climate. Healthcare. Tax. Proximity to airports, to good coffee, to a coastline. Passports, visas. Whether you want a dog. (I want a dog. I have already decided I will name it Hubcap. It is an excellent name for a dog.) Line up the right combination of factors and you’ll land on the right place. Surely.

I wish it were that clean. There are plenty of people living in objectively good places who still feel unsettled. And others in less obvious spots who seem entirely at ease. Which suggests we’re not just solving for geography. The optimisation exercise has a missing variable.

When you strip it back, the places that have felt most like home tend to share other qualities. Your days make sense there. You know how things work without having to think about it. You’re not constantly adjusting yourself to fit in.

That doesn’t always map onto the most exciting place, or the most impressive one. It’s often more ordinary than that. But there’s an ease to it that’s hard to manufacture.

Helmut, we have both evidently spent time living in more than one country, or else have simply moved around more than most, so we know that this gets complicated. We have accumulated reference points. The place that shaped us early on. The place where we built our careers. The place where we met certain people, or where life felt particularly good for a stretch. Each one holds something real. Each one holds a version of us.

The upside is obvious. We develop a broader view of the world. More options. More perspective. We contain multitudes, compounded through experience. The trade-off is harder to name, but I felt it the moment you asked me this question.

I read recently that, when the RSAF organised an evacuation aircraft out of Riyadh, the passengers broke out in song: Majulah Singapura. In that moment did they realise that home is not simply a place on a map? Did they sense it is something deeper? A shared identity, perhaps, or a sense of belonging. The knowledge that when things go wrong, your country will come for you, does that shape our understanding of home? If so, then who would come for us, Helmut, and would we break out in song? Whose anthem shall we sing?

I belong in several places, but not entirely in any of them.

So when the time actually comes to decide where to base myself, it feels less like a choice and more like a negotiation between partial versions of home. None of them wrong. None of them complete.

I’m not there

Knowing you to be a serious man, I looked the word up in the dictionary, in the hope of divining some deeper meaning. The word home predates the idea of a house. Its Old English root, hām, meant not a building but a settlement, a place where you belonged, among people you belonged to. Trace it further back through Proto-Germanic and the Proto-Indo-European root carries the sense of to settle, to dwell, to hold dear. The Old Norse cousin, heimr, went further still. It meant not just home but the known world itself, the ordered place set against the unknown.

It strikes me that the tension so many of us feel today, the sense that home is less about an address and more about belonging, less about a structure and more about ease and connection, isn’t a modern confusion at all. It’s what the word always meant. We didn’t lose the meaning. We just forgot it for a while.

With this in mind, I keep coming back to one word, and a core value that I hold dearly. Community.

We spend a good deal of energy trying to upgrade our surroundings; better location, better lifestyle, better setup. There’s nothing wrong with that. But it can distract from a simpler question: does this place suit the life I actually want to live?

Not the life I used to want. Not the one that sounds good when someone asks at dinner. The one that feels right now. The one that reflects what actually matters to me.

A more useful set of questions, I’ve found, is this:

What does an ordinary day look like here, not the best version, but the normal one, when nothing much is happening? Where do I feel most like myself without having to think about it? Who would I actually see (and who would I matter to) if I lived here? What gets easier? What becomes harder?

These questions don’t resolve to a spreadsheet. But they tend to point somewhere more honest than the optimisation exercise does.

There’s a certain pressure to land on a final answer. To pick a place and commit to it as though it’s permanent. But most things at this stage of life aren’t that fixed, and perhaps they shouldn’t be.

We are allowed to choose something that works now. And we are allowed to change it later, if it stops working.

That said, I try to hold the present with one eye on what’s ahead. My parents have lived in the same three-bedroom semi-detached house for over fifty years. It has served them well, and us brothers for that matter, growing up in it. But will it continue to serve them as they age? The staircase is steep. There’s no walk-in shower. The corridors couldn’t accommodate a wheelchair. The present and the future aren’t the same calculation, and it’s worth knowing which one you’re making.

Maybe home is less a fixed point and more a moving agreement, between who I am and where I’m willing to be. Something you stay in conversation with, rather than settle once and walk away from.

Helmut, I may never find a single place that holds all of me. But I might find places that hold enough. Enough ease. Enough connection. Enough alignment with what matters to me now.

If I can wake up somewhere and feel, without forcing it, that my days make sense there. That I’m not performing, or adjusting, or waiting for something else to begin. Then perhaps that’s as close to home as it gets.

So now, dear friend, it’s your turn. Where is home for you?

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This post was previously published on SUBSTACK.COM.

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