"Home Is a Place You Grow Up Wanting to Leave, and a Place You Grow Old Wanting to Get Back to."

This was actually an assignment I submitted for Writing for Professional Context in the second semester of my study. I intend to post it for I thought it really teaches us something. What do you think?

“Home is a place you grow up wanting to leave, and a place you grow old wanting to get back to.” (John ES.d)

                The quotation above is somehow heartbreaking. I quoted this one from Mr. John whose blog I had visited before. Once I noticed this quotation I didn’t even think to search longer for another quotation afterward. I kept on wondering, ‘how could he be so this truthful?’

                Well, quotation has to be a brief-sufficient sentence that represents our condition—which we never realize that it is like that. I think the quotation above has already required the nature of quotation. We can see from the very first beginning the theme John has brought up here is the idea of home. Relations are then popping up inside our mind; family, parents, children and other mutual relations. Mr. John was apparently trying to declare two conditions about how home is very vulnerable to be expressed. The following paragraph will show you how I paraphrase his quotations according to my understanding:

The first condition is expressing how people crave to leave their hometown. The apparent situation people deal with their ghetto is sometimes the opposite with their ideal city. Thus in their childhood, people often insist to find their ideal occupancy elsewhere. It is irrevocable that whenever they feel older, and they have lived outside their hometown, they will feel regret for themselves not to have home as comfy as they used to have back then. They will compare both places and finally give the upperhand to their hometown, as it is considered the best by the people themselves.

The second condition explains how home represents family. As we know, teenagers—who are growing under parents’ supervision at home—feel ignored and dwelled as they demand for liberation. One thing they may decide to do is leaving home. Their rebellion toward tight boundary of a family will bring them away from their home and settle down in a place they consider ‘cool’. As they have grown up time after time, they will notice how they are tortured to be away from their family, to be apart from their home. They will have a belated regret leaving home once they miss the prestige of family’s touch, the affection parents used to give, the good surrounding from a lively neighborhood. They will find themselves missing to be at home at their olden time.

I can sum up that this quotation ends up with the heart-melting notification not to leave home due to the guilty pressure we may have afterward. Home maybe only a mattered living place, but it gives more than just about memories, it makes our life alive.