I have been thinking a lot lately about why we call a particular place home, and what leads us to live in certain places over others. There’s that common saying ‘home is where the heart is’, but I think that home is where your happy place is.
Often mental health professionals will tell you to try and imagine your happy place when you are feeling anxious or stressed. When someone first said this to me I laughed inside, because I thought it was a cliché and super cheesy. Well it turns out that this technique is a pretty good way of calming down.
My happy place is sitting on the groynes near Brighton Marina with my boyfriend and dog and listening to the waves. Simply being by the ocean makes me feel at ease and at home. However, it wasn’t until I went back there recently that I realised how powerful this place is for me.
My boyfriend and I lived in Brighton for three years, and had our first place in the Marina. We have so many special memories there, it’s where we got to know each other. When we went back there yesterday we had a moment where we were cuddling on the beach and Orla was playing in the sea and we were like, this is it for us, this is where we want to be.
Check out the pretty colours in the sea, I have never seen the water here so bright and so clear. It was like a sign. Orla absolutely loved playing and swimming in the sea, and seeing her having fun in the water instantly fills me with joy.
Obviously life doesn’t always enable you to be in your happy place, and you can’t always live where you want to. Money, work and other things get in the way. We moved to Surrey when my boyfriend got a new job.
I really appreciate where we live at the moment, I adore the woodland and the beautiful countryside. It’s such a convenient location for both 0f us, it’s easy to get to London, Brighton, both our families and I’m close to all my friends.
Despite all this, if I was to picture my happy place, I wouldn’t be imagining where we are now, even though the bluebell woods are totally dreamy. I feel the force pulling me to the coast like an anchor dragging me down to the bottom of the sea.
There’s no doubt that I’m happy where we are at the moment, and it’s definitely where we need to be for practical reasons, but I have a sneaky feeling one day we will gravitate towards Brighton. Home is where you feel most at ease, it’s where your soul seems to belong. Other places might temporarily fill the void, but your heart will always be somewhere else.
Unfortunately we don’t always get to live in our happy place, because, well, life doesn’t always allow you to follow your heart. However, there’s no harm in taking the time to go back ‘home’ and appreciate what you have always enjoyed about a particular place, and that’s what we did this weekend.
Who knows what the future holds. I just wanted to share my thoughts on what ‘home’ really means to me, as well as process some of the feelings I had over the weekend.
