staying home
On my walk the other day through a sleepy neighborhood near my parents’ house in rural Central Florida, I passed by a family gathered around a fire pit on their porch. They exclaimed to me – “We just burned our 2020 calendar!” – “You’ve got the right idea! To a better 2021!” I responded before continuing my walk. As we close out the cursed year of 2020 and turn with bated breath to a (hopefully) better 2021, I have to reflect not only on the countless burn-worthy events of the year of insanity, but on some of the positive outcomes as well. Many of the crises and also the small rays of light circulate around the theme of home.
Undoubtedly, we have all spent more hours at home this past year than normal. For me, being stuck at home meant living in my small 4-bedroom apartment in East Cambridge, with my 3 wonderful roommates, and noticing what my neighborhood and my bedroom are like at every hour of the day. I’d lived there for two years, but with my busy school schedule and absence over holidays, I only knew what my home was like in the early mornings and at night. One of the best things about being stuck there all the time was experiencing how the sun enters and moves across my bedroom throughout the day.
I have a south-facing bay window, which receives morning light out of the left window and the sunset out of the right window. I learned how to open my blinds just right so as to block the direct rays of sun from hitting my eyes while sitting at my desk, but to still let in as much light as possible. I learned how gradually the sun drops in the sky as the year begins to wind down. I learned that the winter sunset can be seen from my right bay window framed just between the two buildings across the street.
I also learned the daily rhythms of our upstairs neighbors from hearing the patterns of their footsteps. I learned of the morning walk routine by the dad who lives across the street with a little boy and a dog, and that of the young woman with the black pug who, as soon as exiting their building, always pees a huge puddle by the tree next to my building’s back staircase. I learned that the church bell tower down the street tolls every day between the hours of 9am and 6pm. I learned many things being stuck at home this year.
Slowing down and tuning in to the rhythms of nature and of my neighbors gave me a sense of interconnectedness with my living environment that I had not experienced before. In a way, it made me feel more human.
The phrases “working from home” and “stuck at home” we have tossed around a lot in the past year, but I place a lot of weight on the word home. I think this year was the first time I began to call my apartment in Cambridge my “home.” Calling the place where you live “home” is almost as intimate as telling your significant other “I love you.” You don’t necessarily move in somewhere and immediately call it home. There is an emotional relationship that must build between yourself and the place in which you live before you can call it your home. Some places you might never even call your home. Instead, you call it your place, your apartment, your house, your flat, your dorm, your condo. Quite neutral – just a denotation. What is it that prevents a place from feeling like home? What makes a place finally feel like home? There is something about the notion of home that is so personal, intimate, and emotional that we don’t always fully acknowledge.
Where one lives – one’s home – contributes to one’s personal identity. Thanks to this past Year of Zoom, this became very evident. Never before has so much consideration been given to one’s background. The choice of Zoom background is a choice to reveal a level of personal identity we previously never disclosed. Now, in every meeting with colleagues, bosses, professors, or students, we invite people to a view inside our homes, and they likewise invite us inside theirs.
We’ve gotten to see many a bookshelf, a blank or decorated wall, a peek at a living room beyond a couch, an occasional kitchen, a neatly made bed (or sometimes unmade bed, who even cares anymore!), and plants galore. We’ve caught glimpses of or even had fun introductions to our Zoom-mates’ partners and/or kids. We’ve loved to see and to show off our kitties and/or doggos.
Getting to reveal and to see how and with whom we and others live has been, in my opinion, a positive outcome of this past year. Boundaries have been taken down, personal identities have been peeled back, and our collective sense of humanity has increased. It’s an odd thing, how the absence of our physical presence together in public places has been replaced by the virtual entry into our private spaces.
No one would argue that getting to see a framed, static view of a fragment of our living environments equates to the experience of being with one another in person, but I do think it has given us the chance to learn different things about each other. And spending more time in our homes, with less stimulus, distraction, and rush, has provided the opportunity to slow down and to appreciate and connect more with our immediate environment. I look forward to 2021 in hopes that it brings the day in which we can finally (safely and with confidence) emerge from our WFH lives. But whenever that day comes, I especially look forward to emerging as different humans than those that withdrew: humans with a deeper sense of shared humanity and appreciation for the little things like the passing of light across a room.
