Home can be a house, a city, a country, a person. It’s where you feel welcomed, appreciated, important. Home is not material or transmissible. It’s highly subjective, ever evolving, priceless and hardly ever definitive. But it’s also hard to notice.
While growing up, likely influenced by my brother’s Springsteen records, I always wanted to leave, go places, discover the world, “find out what I got”. Leaving meant leaving my hometown, my school, where I thought nothing interesting was happening. But it also meant leaving my first home - my parents’.
Leaving a home is not just leaving comfort. It’s facing the possibility of discomfort. It’s sad for the things you leave behind, but it also feels risky, which is what makes it exciting. There’s a paradox here. We work hard to make places feel like home, but it’s the fact that it becomes a home and comfortable that makes it exciting to leave it.
And leaving is often what validates it as a Home. It brings up feelings that we can’t simulate under other circumstances. It brings up memories and nostalgia, but not in the same way we randomly reminiscence events throughout our lives. There’s a sadness that comes with it that signals it’s ending, which is also what marks the start of something new.
This is a thought I was surprised to have a few months ago, in March. I didn’t change apartments or cities. I didn’t move to a different country nor did I end a relationship. I left a job I had for almost 5 years. Working is such a huge part of our lives. We can love our job, or hate it or we might not even care. But we feel a certain level of attachment to it. We feel contentment or fear of change and that grows the longer you stay at it. When I left that job, I felt the same thing I feel when I’m about the leave my home: a sadness of leaving a comfortable situation mixed with a blinding excitement towards what’s to come.
It’s a well delayed announcement, but I joined Nagarro Digital Ventures as a Product Designer, pausing my work as a freelancer for the time being, including my long-term collaboration with Lamassu. It was time for an exciting change. I’m a Nagarrian now ✌️
Regardless of what you do for a living, you can and you should add that tiny bit of magic to your job. It won't cost you anything. It won't take you more time, or be harder to do. But if you're serving someone, going that extra mile makes you look better and helps making the organisation you represent more trustworthy.
