The Soul of Home

Buzz Submitted by : Pascal Derrien

Buzz: Anger: Hostility Towards the Opposition

A Cathartic Story that Many People Will Identify With - Such is our existing Social Condition

We have practiced emotional stupidity for a very long-time and a few that have understood the gift human emotion come through their life journeys to emerge emotionally wise.  The road to that wisdom can be cut into so many millions of different stories and Pascal Derrien is one slice of many stories in his life that define his emotional wisdom. 

When I listen to Pascal's story emotion has been a compass for him driven by acute circumstances and his story exists on the edges of the human bell curve of emotional wisdom - and the life journey that emerges from this story is the road less traveled.  He is a storyteller and his account is likewise.  It is difficult remaining neutral when a story is told this well.

The silent majority are not accomplished at storytelling and in those homes there is a billion little cuts that over years creates difficulty and tension.  Even if we could tell this story, there is a limit to our attention.  This is how we lose history and listen to that history which has a stage and why history changes in the long eye compared to the direct insight of the moment. 

Emotional wisdom is taking in the whole and not the part and it is difficult to observe our story when it is welded organically to our sympathetic nervous system.  The starting and ending point of emotional wisdom thus from my perspective lives and dies with us.  I am not expert enough to discuss "emotional intelligence" because it is a group perspective.

Home is an endangered species because we are not taught given a owners guide to our emotions as an education, the education of emotional wisdom depends on every brick of wisdom we cement together on our life journey.  The creation of home is not created by a bricklayer but by life layer.  That is why meaning and nature are twin forces I now look at.

When meaning does not emanate from home but from work, that informs me where essential energy is often spent and how depletion and reduced bandwidth now create scenario's where toxicity and lesser nature has a chance to infest itself - and where is the win-win in that?

Taking account of evolution, each generation can build on the emotional wisdom that is left in legacy but I find it difficult to recognize what the soil of that emotional wisdom is, when we live in a society that has lost track of its ancestors and so now our stories emanate either from people outside our home or inside our home through that box called television, or that pack called a mobile phone or that package called a computer. 

I am not just addressing the way we have directed meaning away from home, but what of those cultures whose ancestral stories are a part of the education in passing wisdom from one generation to another.  The best example of that were native or indigenous Americans but today the biggest wounds  are what society has reduced first nation homes to.  When a story is told from this extreme reality it is a story we all neglected and thus when we finally hear it, we are shocked at what oozes out of the edges.  In the meantime silence suffocates those homes.

It does not fit the branded view of life that the American Dream is built on the American Nightmare.  It is unfair to use American experience as the proxy for the ills of the world, because there are far worse scenario's in those parts of the world that don't fit in our branded existence.  Well done because now you have an excellent brand because you made me feel your pain - and that is a blanket statement to all the thousands of life stories that are filtered thus.

There are homes that have great soul but they don't look like the picture postcard scenario of the perfect family or the tear-jerking movie script.  I have been in those life giving homes, because there is no facade or image or identification that we can grab hold off.  We can smell the reality of human evolution that is resilient to the infections of inhumanity.

There is always another side to a story we deeply identify with if we accomplished storytellers, but I don't want to buy external experience, there is too much at stake in not being totally present to the life of my own home.   There is nothing more destructive to a home than not giving a home the space it needs to find the humanity it has yet to create. 

The benefit of insights come with the benefits of evolution but our human evolution has been torn asunder by centuries of industrial age thinking and our education has been marketed to us, to a level of conditioning that home is rather a meaningless concept - the concept is our home.

Stand back when I am finding my emotional range because there are some things in life that are nurtured without the hands of society suffocating the first shoots of meaning that are the providence of home.  Meaning returning to home is not what meaning manufacturers want, so it is that we buy packaged meaning to substitute the severed limbs of home.

What living life where meaning is derived from our work has done is to make our workplace and the work we accomplish our home and we cannot have evolution of the human spirit if the foundation stone of that spirit is simply a place we reside in between our role and status in society.   That is why we laud the leadership of work but not the leadership of home - why women are considered less than men, why we cry outside because we have no one inside and why we die in old people homes than in villages where home used to be.

We can listen to Pico Iyer deliver a perspective of home below but I am not seeking to brand my learning journey so I have a stage to tell my story - I want to live a life and the life of my home is the relationship and life that connects me to my core, to my past and to the sacred meaning of home.  Iyer is on the mark about becoming our self - but how do we do that in our branded lives?  We can do that when the soul of home is the birthing place of humanity and the story is the history we share at a private level.  We have no private history, we are not that evolved - we have a lot of public history.  Funny how generation after generation we don't learn from history.

The good news is that we are not that evolved. The greater news is that we are trying to be.  We are seeking that humanity which so far has a broken home.  At least a broken home is better than an illusion, no amount of societal destruction of that which is most sacred can leave us homeless - even the homeless make a home of destitution even if it is few strips of cardboard but yet they are truly homeless.  So are we without meaning when there is no soul in our home.

Since my core value foundation is home I find it odd to talk of work-life balance. Work-life balance is a symptom of a society that places meaning in work rather than meaning in home. The soul of a home is an immensely private human one in a public branded-life world.