Where's home?

"Why do you travel so much?", "Aren't you tired?", "Don't you want to settle down?", "How can you sleep in a different bed every week?" are just some of the questions I'm bombarded with whenever I mention my next travel destination. Usually, I find it quite easy to side-step the cross examination. However of late, there is one question that I'm finding increasingly hard to answer. Where's home?

Is it Malaysia where I was born? Or Singapore where I earn a living? Or China where I've spent the last six months? Or Lake Tekapo in New Zealand which feels like home in my heart?

I found the perfect answer in the most ironic place. Between the pages of Silverkris - Singapore Airlines' inflight magazine. It's an essay written by Pico Iyer, a critically acclaimed novelist, which captures so eloquently my sentiments about 'home'.

"For many people, I know, this lack of a single fixed home is a challenge, which leaves them feeling neither here nor there. But for the rest of us - the ones who see the glass as half-full, perhaps - it allows us to root ourselves in where we're going and not where we came from, to be free of resentments of the past and be honorary citizens of tomorrow.

I savour the fact that 'home' is a work-in-progress for me, like a manuscript I'm constantly extending and revising and fine-tuning; and I savour it because I know I can't change the fact. There's no single tradition I can go back to and cling to as my own; but there are any number of traditions I can weave into the carpet that is my mobile home.

When, one day, while at my parents' house in California, I went upstairs and saw that we were surrounded by 70ft flames - by the end of the evening, a forest fire had reduced our house and everything we owned to ash - I knew more than ever that home would have to be something I constructed within, invisible and portable, a state of mind or a part of my soul more than a piece of soil."