Nothing eventful happened on April 2, 1956—except that I was born. My mother passed me on to another family just a few weeks later. So, I was adopted. And so, sometime that April, I found myself in a makeshift cradle, a drawer with four people staring down at me. Two older girls and a middle-aged couple who would become my new family, for reasons I still don’t fully understand.
My new home was a tenement in Govan, overshadowed by the towering shipyards that dominated the skyline. From our third-story window came the sounds of riveters, the pounding of angry hammers, and the erratic sizzle of torches flaring like fireworks as they sculpted metal into majestic vessels. The reasons for my arrival in that household remain a mystery, obscured by time and tangled threads of secrecy.
Govan, in those days, was a claustrophobic maze of crumbling tenements. The buildings leaned close, conspiring to shut out the light, leaving the streets as drab and shadowed as sepia-toned photographs from the Victorian era. In narrow side streets, stray dogs roamed freely while vermin scurried in the darkness, always foraging for scraps. Life there was governed by the harsh economics of survival, a place where razor gangs, loan sharks, and corner pubs shaped the rhythm of daily existence. Ambition struggled to breathe in that stifling atmosphere, and every corner whispered of escape, of a better life elsewhere.
Decades later, during a routine dental visit, I came across Avril Paton’s painting Windows to the West. It struck a deep chord, transporting me back to a winter’s day in my ninth year. Full of youthful curiosity, I had crossed the Clyde with friends, eager to explore Kelvin’s Museum. But as boys do, we wandered off track and into an old, condemned tenement.
Lost in the adventure, we meandered through Glasgow’s West End until dusk crept in, catching us unawares on Saltoun Street—the very one Paton captured in her painting. Though her inspiration came from a blizzard in 1993, her depiction mirrored my own memory. I peered into warmly lit windows and saw families gathering for meals, decorating for Christmas. Two old men, mirror images of each other, dozed beneath their moustaches. The scene stirred something in me—a longing, a recognition of something missing in my own life.
If I could name what was absent in my early years, it was a sense of home—stability, warmth, belonging. Paton’s image of Saltoun Street, transformed by snow, became a metaphor for my own fleeting joys and the elusive permanence I had yearned for since childhood. As the snowflakes in her painting settled, so too did my thoughts, revealing a life woven from threads of adventure, displacement, and an enduring search for a place to truly call home. A weight I have carried all my life.
Image generated with the assistance of Microsoft Copilot
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The Structure of Home: Feedback Loops of Belonging and Displacement
Reading back through older posts for inspiration, this one stayed with me. What Jim describes is not just a memory. It is a systems account of what home actually is. Home is not a place. It is a set of reinforcing feedback loops: warmth, consistency, recognition, belonging. Each loop strengthens the others. A family gathering for a meal reinforces the sense of belonging. Decorating for Christmas reinforces continuity. The two old men, mirror images of each other, are a loop of companionship that repeats itself daily without needing to be named. When those loops are present, the system produces stability. When they are absent, the system produces displacement. The painting is a diagnostic tool. It does not just depict a scene. It reveals the structure that was missing. The warm windows, the families, the snow settling on Saltoun Street. The observer is outside the system, looking in. That is a boundary position. It is the position of someone who can see the loops clearly because they are not inside them. The reflection on what was absent - stability, warmth, belonging - is a structural observation. It names the feedback loops that the system failed to provide. The displacement is not a personal failing. It is a system output. And the enduring search for home is the search for a system that produces those loops reliably. Regards,
Russell Larke
BA (Hons) Business Management | MSc Candidate (Systems Thinking)
Trading Beyond Charts
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Thank you for this, Russell. I found your interpretation fascinating, particularly your description of the boy looking through the windows as occupying a “boundary position.” I had never thought of that moment in quite those terms.
At nine years old, of course, I had no language for what I was seeing. I only knew that those illuminated windows seemed to contain something I wanted but could not name. Looking back, I could call it stability, warmth and belonging, as you suggest. Perhaps being outside allowed me to recognise those things more clearly than I might have had I grown up taking them for granted.
I also like your idea of home being created through reinforcing patterns: meals together, Christmas decorations, familiar faces, companionship, rituals repeated until they become part of the fabric of life. Individually, these things can seem insignificant; collectively, they tell a person, “You belong here.”
Where I might add something to your systems interpretation is that I wonder whether there is an irreducibly human element at the centre of those feedback loops. A family meal is not home merely because it is repeated. It becomes home because of what passes between the people sitting at the table: recognition, affection, acceptance, perhaps most importantly, the knowledge that one is wanted.
Your final observation particularly stayed with me: “the enduring search for home is the search for a system that produces those loops reliably.” Perhaps that is true. But your comment has made me wonder whether my search was ultimately for something even simpler—a place, and people, in whose presence I no longer felt that I was standing outside the window looking in.
Thank you for making me see my own essay from a perspective I had not considered.