If home is where the heart is, then where am I now? Maybe I got off a few stops too early, maybe one too many. Maybe this is just a longer way home, a detour maybe. So the question glaring at me was not where I was, the question was where my home was. In a world as busy and fast-paced as today’s, with families and loved ones dispersed across different continents, who knows where home is, or worse, where the heart really is…

So one begins to wonder if the heart, in its philosophical sense, could refer to an omnipresent entity. One that can be present in Rome and Sydney simultaneously, one that does not have to cease to exist in one place to emerge in another. How is that scientifically plausible? Or is it that a single ‘heart’ can contain a multitude of emotions within it, being almost ominous in essence; it longs for people and places for its own reasons, its own desires. The driving force of the heart is essentially selfishness, a dark devotion towards oneself. It does not directly imply a lack of concern for others, in fact it does not mean that at all. It means that one heart desires another for the pleasure that only it can feel and not necessarily be able to express. So the benefit from this heart’s yearning is something that no other heart will fully comprehend.

The way I see it, in theory there are two reasons for this apparent lack of understanding. One is that emotions are not words or actions, they are simply emotions, intangibles. Words were invented to express the mere tangible substances of life, or at least so it seems when no matter which or how many words one uses, they never suffice. And actions, well they may portray more than just words, but neither will do justice to these abstract concepts. It is in fact all a matter of perception. Is the anger I feel, the anger you feel? Is the love I feel, the love you feel? Not only does the feeling vary from one to the other, but also the variety of its intensity is impossible to determine.

And the second reason is because if heart A is not concerned with the benefit heart B is deriving from it, it is a somewhat mutually-beneficial contract. Heart B is just as selfishly extracting its requirements from heart A, so is there such a thing as unconditional love? A mother might disagree with my theory here, but how can she possibly know that her ‘unconditional’ love is being reciprocated in any way, maybe not in action, but in essence at least.

It is only a theory and if it were to me to choose one I would choose the former. But to conclude, if one is never sure where the heart truly lies, or even what truly lies within the heart, then where is home?