National Good Neighbor Day - Thoughts about Home and good Neighbors

A home is where the heart is, where you have family, where you are loved and where dreams grow. And where you have a great neighborhood. Being a good neighbor is an art - having good neighbors is a gift - which makes life richer. You know it when it feels right. In that moment you are at home.

For almost everyone, "home" is the center of their world and a place of order that contrasts with the chaos elsewhere. When asked to draw a picture of "where you live", children and adolescents worldwide invariably center their drawings around the home, making it the anchor for everything else.

"Home" is the place where you feel in control and properly oriented in space and time; it is a predictable and secure place. In the words of poet Robert Frost, "Home is the place that, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." In short, "home" is the primary connection between you and the rest of the world.

If home is where the heart is, then by its most literal definition, my home is wherever I am. I've always been liberal in my use of the word. If I'm going to visit my parents, I'm going home and if I'm returning, I'm also going home. My host parents' apartment was home while I lived there, as was my college dorm, where I stayed during my internship. And the truth is, the location of your heart, as well as the rest of your body, does affect who you are. The differences may seem trivial (a new group, a new subculture means new friends, more open spaces make you want to go outside more), but they can lead to lifestyle changes that are significant.

Memories, too, are cued by the physical environment. When you visit a place you used to live, these cues can cause you to revert back to the person you were when you lived there. The rest of the time, different places are kept largely separated in our minds. The more connections our brain makes to something, the more likely our everyday thoughts are to lead us there. But connections made in one place can be isolated from those made in another, so we may not think as often about things that happened for the few months we lived someplace else. Looking back, many of my homes feel more like places borrowed than places possessed, and while I sometimes sift through mental souvenirs of my time there, in the scope of a lifetime, I was only a traveler, a 'rolling stone".

I can't possibly live everywhere I once labeled home, but I can frame these places on my walls, in my mind and in my heart.  No one is ever free from their social or physical environment our real or mental neighbors and friends. And whether or not we are always aware of it, a home is a home because it blurs the line between the self and the surroundings, and challenges the line we try to draw between who we are and where we are.

I hope that everyone has their 'home' - their good neighbours
Enjoy life - Enjoy Community!

In this context I like to share this song “Wherever I Lay My Heart (That’s My Home)” and how I understand the song - it alludes to the singer being what some refer to as a ‘rolling stone’. That is to say that he is the transient type – one who does not settle down.