As we tumble toward the finish line of this program, I’ve been doing a lot more reflecting on it than I honestly thought I would have just a few weeks ago. In many ways, these days feel strangely similar to a regular term at Carleton: there’s a buzzing energy in the air as we all walk that tightrope of squeezing the most joy out of our limited time left while simultaneously being acutely aware of impending deadlines and the need to tie up the loose ends of our academic work. But there’s also the murmurings of nostalgia seeping into the corners of our minds. It’s the surprise at finding this feeling within myself which leads me to write this post—they say that on the internet, capitalizing on nostalgia leads to good content. I recall from middle school that the fourth step in the scientific method is to test the hypothesis, so here goes an experiment.
Those who know me are well aware that by the halfway point of this OCS, I was ready to go home. It wasn’t so much a feeling of homesickness in the ways I’ve felt it before, but a newfound understanding of what “home” really means to me; of all the people, values, routines, and little moments that weave it together. Much of the process of contemplating these things happened fairly immediately after the initial “honeymoon phase” of the program wore off at the end of the third week—when we were coming back from our northern trip to Ravenna/Padua/Venice—so by midterm, I was balancing staying present for the remaining five weeks while looking forward to prioritizing the parts of home that were missing from my life.
Unfortunately, those who know me also know that I am notoriously… challenged by striking this balance. While I did my best to keep academically engaged in our discussions and site visits, it was a much rarer occasion that I stopped, and took a breath, and looked around me, and allowed for a moment of wonder to seep in. Instead, I often found my head down, rushing toward what constituted “home,” willing it to approach faster. But this morning, as the program winds itself down, I made the space for one of those moments. And it was quite rewarding.
A song I’ve been listening to often in the past two months is “House by the Sea” by the artist Moddi. It’s a beautiful acoustic piece with warm strings and wistful undertones. One verse that has especially been running through my mind is this: “They say home is a place you can choose to be//And I’ve decided to carry home inside me.” The more moments I’ve taken recently to reflect on my experiences here, the more I’ve come back to this line. Yes, being away from the weave of “home” has deepened my understanding of its individual yarns. But as one of my apartment-mates can certainly attest to, knitting is a portable activity. And here, I’ve discovered new patterns, new methods, new colors that will enable those yarns to yield an even fuller, sturdier sweater that will keep me oh so warm back in Minnesota winters. Perhaps, as the song suggests, home is never something static but is something more akin to a way of being that you can choose to employ wherever you are.
Or perhaps I’ve been getting too philosophical for my own good. Those who know me also know that I have a tendency for the dramatic. Either way, these sorts of thoughts, I think, are exactly what I was hoping to gain from the program—I’m certainly taking away and thankful for a knowledge of medieval Italy, but my primary incentive for studying abroad was always to create the potential for amorphous reflections on myself in ways I wouldn’t otherwise have been able to. I’d posit to say that musings on the meaning of “home” counts as that, wouldn’t you?
These next few days, I’m looking forward to taking more little moments to appreciate all that has played a part in generating these thoughts and experiences for me. My aunt, who will also soon be heading home from travels, tells me that as she’s counting down the days, she writes down one thing she’ll miss about being away, too. Maybe she’s on to something.
I hope to keep noticing the parts of home I’ve taken with me; the parts which have only enriched those I haven’t been able to carry across the Atlantic.