Make Yourself At Home

A good dwelling offers more than shelter and security. A truly good house evokes a sense of home. Our sense of home comes from within us. It emer­ges when we enter an environment with which we can identify. This sense is not exclusive to one’s own house. It can surface whenever we feel safe enough to be completely ourselves — beyond all insecurity and pretension.

A house founded on pretension and insecurity will seldom, if ever, make us feel anything more than pretentious and insecure. For a place to feel safe, it must first earn our trust. It must be honest, and an extra couple of thousand square feet tacked on in a vain attempt to conceal our insecurity is not hon­est.

Home is our defense against what can sometimes seem like a chaotic and demanding world. It is a fortress built from the things and principles that we value most. The inclusion of anything else is like a crack in the fortress wall. Order and tranquility are compromised when things that are extraneous to our happiness surround us. Unnecessary elements in the home dilute the in­tensity of the life within. Only when everything in our immediate environment is essential to our contented survival will home and the life within take on a truly essential quality.

Too many of our houses are not a refuge from chaos but merely extensions of it. The sense that our lives may not be entirely whole results in a desire for something more to fill the perceived void. This can lead to the purchase of an oversized house in which substance is obscured by excess. The happiness we really seek cannot be found by purchasing more space or more stuff. Those who do not recognize what is enough will never have enough.