In November 2023, after returning from a trip, I wrote a short post called Home Sweet Home.

My mother-in-law picked me up from the station. Later my wife came home from work, we had dinner together and talked about what had happened while I was away.

I was tired and not feeling particularly well, but I remember how good it felt to be back.

I called it home.

At the time, there was nothing unusual about that word.

Recently, however, I started wondering:

What actually makes a place feel like home?

A Home Is More Than a Place

The obvious answer might be familiarity.

We learn where everything is. We develop routines. We recognize the sounds around us. We know the streets and the people.

Over time, a place becomes familiar.

But familiarity alone doesn’t seem enough.

I can become familiar with a hotel I visit regularly without considering it home. Someone can live somewhere for years without ever feeling completely at home there.

And a completely unfamiliar place can occasionally produce the opposite reaction.

We arrive somewhere for the first time and somehow think:

This feels like home.

That seems strange.

How can somewhere I’ve never been feel familiar?

I Have Felt Home in More Than One Place

I’ve experienced this several times since living in Japan.

When I drive through Hirugano Kogen and see the snowy mountain peaks from the tollway, something about the experience takes me back to Switzerland.

I remember sitting in the back of the car as a child while my father drove through the Swiss landscape. I would look through the window as we traveled to different scenic places, including the Alps.

Decades later and thousands of kilometers away, a Japanese mountain landscape can awaken that same feeling.

Something similar happened when I visited Shiga Prefecture.

Seeing Lake Biwa for the first time and looking across it from Biwako Terrace immediately reminded me of Lake Lugano in Ticino, which I had visited several times while living in Switzerland.

Lake Biwa wasn’t familiar to me.

I had never seen it before.

Yet something about it felt like home.

Perhaps We Never Experience a Place Separately

At first, I thought this could simply be explained by memory.

One landscape reminds me of another.

But the more I thought about it, the less separate those experiences seemed.

When I look at snowy mountains in Japan, I don’t experience the mountains first and then attach Switzerland to them afterward.

My previous experiences are already part of the person looking at those mountains.

Research into autobiographical memory helps explain some of this. Places, landscapes, smells, sounds and other sensory experiences can bring memories forward without us deliberately searching for them.

But perhaps remembering doesn’t fully describe what happens.

The past can become part of how the present feels.

A mountain isn’t only a mountain.

A lake isn’t only a lake.

A street isn’t only a street.

We encounter them through everything we’ve already lived.

The same Lake Biwa can therefore mean something completely different to two people standing beside each other.

Physically, they are looking at the same lake.

Experientially, perhaps they never are.

Places Become Part of Us

Psychologists studying place attachment have found that our relationships with places can become connected with memory, identity, familiarity and belonging.

That makes intuitive sense to me.

A place where we have spent years of our lives is no longer simply a location.

The streets contain routines.

A house contains ordinary days.

A landscape contains journeys.

A room contains conversations.

Objects contain stories.

Places become connected with people and periods of our lives.

Perhaps that is why returning somewhere after many years can be so powerful.

We aren’t merely recognizing the place.

We are recognizing parts of our own lives within it.

And leaving doesn’t necessarily erase those relationships.

We May Have More Than One Home

For a long time, I probably thought about home as something singular.

You come from somewhere.

That is home.

Then perhaps you move somewhere else and eventually the new place becomes home.

But I’m no longer convinced one home has to replace another.

Switzerland can still feel like home to me.

The Netherlands can feel like home when I return to familiar places from the many years I spent there.

And Japan can be home too.

Those feelings don’t contradict one another.

Research into migration has found something similar. People who move between countries can maintain attachments to previous homes while simultaneously creating new ones. Home doesn’t necessarily transfer cleanly from one place to another.

Perhaps it accumulates.

Different places become home in different ways.

We Carry Places With Us

This was the part I initially found difficult to articulate.

We often imagine memories as things stored inside our minds while places remain outside us.

But lived experience doesn’t feel that separate.

The environments we experience help shape us.

The Swiss landscapes I saw when I was young became part of my experience of mountains.

The places I lived in the Netherlands became part of my understanding of everyday life.

And now the landscapes, routines and ordinary experiences of Japan are becoming part of me too.

So when somewhere new reminds me of somewhere old, perhaps I’m not simply comparing two locations.

The person experiencing the new place already carries the old one.

And the relationship works in both directions.

Lake Lugano became part of how I experienced Lake Biwa.

Now Lake Biwa has become part of what I carry too.

Perhaps someday another lake somewhere else will awaken both.

But Places Carry Something of Us Too

There is another side to this.

We don’t only carry home with us.

We also leave something of ourselves in the places where we live.

We arrange rooms.

Plant gardens.

Walk familiar roads.

Develop routines.

Eat together.

Work.

Rest.

Talk.

Experience ordinary days that don’t seem particularly significant while they’re happening.

Gradually the environment becomes intertwined with a life.

This may be why losing a home can mean far more than losing a building.

And why returning to an old house can feel strange when the people and life that once filled it are gone.

The building can remain while the home has changed.

A house is physical.

Home is relational.

It exists somewhere between ourselves, other people, our memories and the places through which our lives unfold.

Home Is Where the Heart Is

After investigating all of this, I arrived at an expression I’ve heard countless times:

Home is where the heart is.

It always sounded sentimental to me.

Now I think it describes something surprisingly difficult to put into words.

Not the literal heart, of course.

The heart as everything we carry within us.

Our feelings.

Memories.

Relationships.

Experiences.

The people who mattered.

The landscapes that shaped us.

And all the connections we’ve formed between them.

Perhaps that is why I can drive through snowy mountains in Japan and suddenly feel something of Switzerland.

Or look across Lake Biwa for the first time and somehow feel at home.

The places aren’t the same.

I am the connection between them.

And every new place I experience can become another part of that connection.

Maybe we don’t leave our previous homes completely behind when we move somewhere new.

We carry something of them forward.

And as we live somewhere else, we add something more.

Years ago, when I returned from that trip and wrote Home Sweet Home, I didn’t think about any of this.

I simply knew how it felt to come home.

Perhaps that feeling already contained the answer.

Home really is where the heart is.