What home means to me

The visit to Barik Ab made me once again think about the concept of home. A concept that has taken up my thoughts for many years.

When I was a kid, I dreamt that only the whole wide world could be my home. Studying books of Alaska, Africa, and inner Asia, I got obsessed with the idea that the place where I grew up is just too small to be a home. Aching on all real and imagined walls, I tried to break out, to find home. As soon as I reached the right age, I started traveling, in diameters of one hundred kilometers around my home town at the beginning, widening these diameters with every travel and every year. On each of these travels I learned something about myself, and about home. Eventually I wrote my thesis about the relationships that urban migrants in Nairobi had to their hometowns and villages, to their “left behind” relatives. The title of my thesis was “in Nairobi I have my house, upcountry I have my home”. I remember one interview partner telling me that “in life, one can have many houses, but only one home: The home where one has been born and the home where one will eventually return to, either alive or for the final travel”. For a while, I adapted this concept of home, and as a result got closer to my home region and home town than ever before. It seemed that by living far away, I was able to build up a feeling for home. Over the last years, though, I reassessed my concept of home, and if I would be asked again today, I wouldn’t answer anymore that South Tyrol is my home. I would answer that certain elements of that region are, have always been, will always be home: for instance, the lake not far from my house that has its own magic at each day of the year, each hour of the day; few coffee-shops in the next bigger town; the train station where I have arrived so many times, from so many different directions, with so many different memories; the house of my parents, where I still have a room, currently only inhabited by my contrabass and my books. But more than anything else, I came to the conclusion that mountains are my home. I can watch them for hours and hours without getting tired, I can climb them up without getting exhausted. There is something unexplainable that attracts and connects me to everything that is higher than its surroundings; landscapes that display a certain elusiveness and roughness. So, in many ways, I feel more at home here in Kabul than I did in Somaliland or Nairobi, merely for the fact that I am able to see mountains as one of the first things in the morning when driving to the office (given that the sky is not covered with snow or smog). But the fact that I see them also awakens a restlessness in me, knowing that I want be able to follow the routes that I imagine up through the snow covered flanks of these mountains when watching them from the far distance. There are these moments when I simply feel like screaming to break the walls around me, knowing that a city cant offer in the long run the elements that I need to feel home. And so, my plan actually is to work for a while, before taking a time out for an extensive trek in some of the mountains I always wanted to visit: inner Asia, or maybe Patagonia. Who knows where I will end up eventually.
Who couldnt feel home in a place as miracolous as the lake shown on the picture above? :)