Comforting Spaces: What Makes Us Feel at Home in the World?

Most people associate “home” with safety, security, and comfort. Our first homes tend to hold nostalgic places in our memories. Early life experiences, some real and some imagined, shape our lifelong ideas of what it means to be “at home” in the world. I have recently had the pleasure and privilege to live and work in Germany, one of my first homes. Although much has changed, surprisingly much is still familiar and comforting. Even after all these years, there are rituals, foods, songs, holidays, and customs that are imbued with memories of my early childhood. Spring cherries remind me of a tree in the neighbor’s garden where I was allowed to go and pick fresh fruit; the “spargel” signs outside of restaurants remind me of the excitement of eating fresh white asparagus with new potatoes.

Spring meal

Source: Jasmin Tahmaseb

As I reflect on my childhood experiences and contemplate life now, I wonder about the meaning of home. Home, of course, is much more than a physical space; our notions of home are shaped in socio-historical, personal, and cultural contexts. Home has material dimensions to it, but the more defining powerful aspects of “home” are social and psychological.

The comforts of home

Source: Jasmin Tahmaseb

Personal and environmental relationships are defined by many interrelated aspects of our lives, like personal identity, goals, hopes, and dreams, health and financial concerns, and of course our connections with others. I have friends who are in later adulthood and contemplating moving away from their long-time homes as their life circumstances change. In general, moving is viewed with mixed emotions—excitement, sadness, hesitation, fear, and anxiety. As they contemplate these changes, they also worry about how they will feel in their new homes. Will the new spaces provide them with the comforts of “home”? Will they be able to connect to others, to their new communities, or new cultures and societies? As I face my own later adulthood, what changes lie in my future? What do I want from my “home” at this stage of my life?

For an answer, I return to a question I have asked myself personally and explored professionally: What makes us feel “at home” in a house, a community, a city, or a country? What is essential for us to feel safe, to feel connected, to have a sense of trust in the society that surrounds us and shapes our life? As a lifelong immigrant, it is a question that shapes my own well-being. It is also one that I have addressed in my work on connection, meaning, and well-being in later life.

The homes of our childhood live only in memory. Research tells us that the myth of “returning home” can be a powerful one for immigrants. This myth often provides comfort during times of assimilation stress. Most immigrants create homes that are imbued with memories of the homeland. They engage in cultural practices of the home culture in order to maintain their connections and cultural identity. These practices are not limited to those who immigrate from other cultures. People who move from rural to urban spaces, from east to west, north to south, away from mountains or the sea, experience similar longings and desires to maintain (often romanticized) connections to early homes.

How do these memories shape our later lives? Social and emotional selectivity theory (Carstensen, 2006) tells us that time plays an important role in how we view our life goals and plans. According to this theory, as we age, we tend to change the way we view our life paths. We recognize that time is limited and that there is a need to prioritize experiences and focus on what is important and emotionally gratifying. Such recognition about the limitation of time can also make us realize that there may not be many opportunities left to reconnect to early places, spaces, and people who once meant “home” to us?

Most of the over 5 million older immigrants in the U.S. are long term immigrants who have spent many years living in America. Many came as refugees, either economic or political, and cannot return to their homes; some have no homes to return to. The world is also very different from the one in which today’s older adults were born and spent their early life. As we move, migrate, and immigrate, from neighborhood to neighborhood, city to city, and country to country, how do we cope with the existential loss we experience when we leave each place behind? Does this loss increase as we approach later life, or the end of life?

My father died 12 years ago. He was an enthusiastic immigrant; he loved the United States where he spent many years of his adult life. In the last year of his life, he heard about the death of a distant cousin in Chicago. As we discussed this family loss, my father asked me, “What about the body? Where will he be buried. He will not be “at home” among his family, his ancestors.” I was surprised by my father’s question and concern. I did not realize that, even though he was very happy living his later years in the U.S., he wanted to spend his afterlife in his “home” country, among his family in Iran.

Notions of home run deep in our psyche. What feels like home is psychologically complex for each person at every stage of life. For immigrants, the concept of home is further influenced by an ongoing struggle between connection to new homes and memories of early homes in a very different culture. Life review can be therapeutic, as each of us shapes and re-shapes our story over time (Erikson, 1974). In later life especially, we tend to review our early life experiences. In this process, the spaces and places that we call and have called home play a central role as we shape our final narratives. They can help us avoid loneliness and alienation. Having conversations with friends, children, and grandchildren about the universal longing for home and our early memories of home, while recognizing that those “real homes" live only in memories, can provide comfort and ease during late-life existential fear and alienation.