Day #804 - House and Home

Sense of Place

I visited my Great Aunt at the weekend. Only recently did she move out of the house she had lived in for 80 years. And no sooner had she left than developers levelled the old bungalow, and built two new family homes. As I drove last last mile to her new house, I passed the old one, thinking about our relationship with place.

She had moved there as a young women, from Germany, only two years after the end of the Second World War, and laid down layer upon layer of memories through the subsequent decades.

We never really own the land under our feet, except in an abstract concept of legal and economic systems, but we do fully own - and inhabit - our narratives of place, our stories of home.

These are woven through our conscious choice, and every action. We weave ourselves into a place, turning a mere ‘house’ into a treasured ‘home’. Simply living somewhere does not make it homely, and conversely, demolishing a house may not remove a sense of belonging - as displaced peoples around the world understand all too well. They do not seek to return to a physical structure so much as an idea of place.

This too is, in a way, part of our leadership story: to hold not simply structural boundaries, but the idea of a place (which we sometimes call culture, but it’s much more than that).

I hope you had a great weekend: welcome to those of you who have joined us here recently. We are a community in dialogue with our Social Leadership practice, for sixty seconds a day

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