Make Your Home An Oasis

Travelling the world is a formative experience. It does not change who you are, it is what creates you. The experiences that you have and the people that you meet are valuable exactly because they were fleeting. No other person in history will ever have the same experience because they did not have the benefit of seeing it from your perspective. It was only you standing there at the moment, seeing everything from your vantage point and hearing only what could be heard  at that moment. As Heisenberg (not the Breaking Bad character but Werner Heisenberg, the German theoretical physicist) said, ‘We have to remember that what we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.’ We change the world by interacting with it and experiencing it. Life is a conversation, and it’s one that is worth having.

However, sometimes it is necessary to take a step back and relax. As great as it is to see how others live and to join them in their culture, you should also make sure that you start living your own life. Learning who you are is of little use if you do not embrace it. Part of being yourself is learning where it is that you are comfortable. Creating a home is as much an expression of your nature as the things that you learnt when travelling. Here a few tips to make where you live just as alluring as the places people travel the world to see:

First, and perhaps most importantly, your home should speak to who you are as a person. If you have travelled a lot, embrace that. Put up photos of the things you’ve done and the people you’ve met. Display the things that you brought back and share them with people who didn’t have your experience. It is often said that a house needs to have character. There is nothing better than infusin it with your own.                                           

Second, life can be hectic sometimes, especially when you’ve been throwing yourself into learning as much as you can about it. Your home does not need to be a party all the time. It should be an oasis, one to which you can sometimes retreat in order to spend time with yourself. Your garden, in particular, is a place to relax especially if it is a pond. They are not as expensive as you might suspect (here are some pond pumps at discount prices for example). Nothing can de-escalate the stress of everyday life quite as well as long, lazy evenings in your own space.

Thirdly, invite people over. Just as the beauty of places around the world lies in the shared experience of people that you saw them with or the people that you met, your home is not complete until you share with the people you care about. You do not need to have raucous parties that last all night, but you also do not need to behave like the stereotypically perfect host at a dinner party. Be yourself and do what you love and your friends and family will soon see your home as a place that they want to visit, and they may even be jealous too.