A few weeks before I was about to move to New York City from my hometown of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, to pursue a masters degree, I decided to take in an early morning yoga class. When I got to the studio, the instructor told the group that she had decided to conduct the practice a little differently that day. She wanted to try something called “talk shop”. She would ask a question, and while we stretched with our mats positioned in a circle, we could discuss what the topic meant to each of us. I thought it sounded interesting, and the other participants agreed. We got into our mat circle and began, albeit slightly apprehensively.
For 20 minutes we bent and swayed and did all the normal yogi-like movements, and then she asked us: “What is home?”. The question seemed incredibly fitting to my situation, and I was sure I would likely be the only one who had been contemplating the subject in the last few weeks. Not so. Someone else was actually moving away too – that very day! Another had recently moved to Edmonton and was trying to find her place in a new community. Still another had just had a roommate leave, and was feeling a shift in their own sense of home through the departure. We each shared our feelings of what creates a home. In the end, it seemed like to each of us, it was a feeling rather than a place. And the feeling centered around balance and belonging.
Since that day, and my subsequent move to New York, I’ve often thought of that yoga class. It’s true, especially in a big new city that I yearn for that intangible feeling of home now, more than ever. Is home something external, that changes with circumstance, or can a sense of home be created internally? Would it be possible to be so at home within yourself that a city, or a roommate, or your circle of friends had little baring on the feeling inside?
I’d like the explore the concept of home, and all the ways, over my first semester at NYU, that I can work at creating a sense of it within a new environment.
balanceandbelonging 