Many of us decided to go home during fall break, which meant that many of us had to leave home to come back to campus once fall break came to a close. For many, it’s a bittersweet feeling knowing that the parting is temporary. While we may be excited to return to our college friends, it can be sad to leave our familiar home behind. Others may just feel excited to connect with college friends and the community they have built away from home.

But beyond the home-cooked food, the reunion with the house pets and the meetings with close friends lies the overwhelming recognition of being “home.” It’s the feeling of peace that comes with being in a place full of memories.

It’s that feeling and comfort that defines a “home,” beyond any concrete, four walled structure, and we continue to build it wherever we go. 

It’s the spirit of home that we search for in the people we form relationships with. Whether it’s a friend or a life partner, we look for people who bring comfort and warmth—a familiar face that we can return to and feel connected with.

Some are still finding that home, moving from place to place. This journey is a lonely one, and it can be scary to break away from what is known and certain. They begin their next chapter on their own, setting up artifacts to make their new house more personal. But soon, that same cold room can glow bright with the laughter of friends, and the walls turn vibrant colors after countless stories and late night conversations. It is with the people we find that we begin to build memories of our own to look back on, golden moments that motivate us to keep moving forward.

These feelings can last, even when it’s time to pack up our bags and continue life’s journey. We take what we’ve learned with us and move on to somewhere new, still remaining connected with what we left behind. This leads us to form more connections everywhere we go—the cycle repeats. 

This can mean that for some people, home is in multiple places. Whether it is where family lives or where friends are found, a little bit of home rests with them. These different homes could be close together and easy to travel to, but for many they are far apart. Part of us gets left with each home as we journey on to the next.

And maybe that means that home is not finite, that it’s grown and cultured everywhere we go. In each place we pour a little home into the earth we stand on, leaving our mark in some form. No matter how many people we meet or how many places we go, there’s always some amount of home left for us to pour someplace else. 

At the same time, we collect the homes of the people around us, people who entrust us to hold a bit of theirs for the rest of our lives. We learn from them and grow with them in the time we have together and, when it’s time to part ways, we take their lessons with us as we move on to the next chapter. 

Not only does this mean that home is something that we find everywhere we go, but home is also something that we constantly work to build. It’s a culmination of our memories and experiences and all that we find familiar, supported by the people we met along the way to make these experiences as familiar as they are. It’s an idea of tranquility we set for ourselves so we can one day relax within its metaphorical soft walls and enjoy the world we’ve built around us, our safe space. We try our hardest to make it as happy as possible.

That’s the meaningful part as we go through our lives and build our own homes: our home is something that is constantly changing. It grows with us as we progress from chapter to chapter, and the more we experience, the more we feel home all around us. It will grow and change just as we do.

So, as we sit in the home we build now at this university, we can reminisce about the memories that rest like photos on the walls and stories of our experiences that pile on the shelf. Of course, our home has plenty of empty space for all the memories that are to come. We can lean back and relax in front of the (school-sanctioned) fireplace, sipping a cup of hot chocolate, ready to bear the cold of the winter ahead.