Home. To me it doesn’t necessarily mean a physical place, but it can
I think it can be anything that gives one inner peace, a sense of comfort and grounding
It can be different things to different people
I don’t feel at home anywhere.
Maybe it’s because I left everything, I knew in pursuit of something unknown
I left India when I was 20 and moved to Canada
Ever since that I’ve always felt like a nomad
Just moving around
I’ve been hungry and homeless
I’ve considered suicide
Travelled to a remote North Canadian Arctic town, adventures through Southeast Asia, lived
in a small town in Southern China, met good people all over the world, very few, slightly
less than good, at least at the time when I met them
Times changed
Perspectives changed
Life is stable now
But I still don’t feel at home
My friend once told me, home, for some people might not always be a physical place
It could be an internal space, or even a person
I do access that place once in a while when I am completely in the moment
The film you see is also made when I was fully immersed in that moment
no thoughts, no distractions
Maybe that’s why I love travelling
When you are in a routine, day in and day out, your mind goes on an auto pilot mode
But when you travel, you encounter new things, new people, new challenges, that forces you
to be present
It becomes easier to stay in the moment
I am not talking about a vacation, where you lounge around and do absolutely nothing.
They are undeniably pleasant and needed, at times too
but the kind of travelling I am talking about is where you are out
in the real world, even going to a part of your own
city, you haven’t been to, or taking a bus route you haven’t taken, maybe moving to
a new country where you don’t know the language and you are forced to communicate in a sign language
Moments where everything else is stripped off in an encounter except for each other’s humanity
But such moments, come with certain confrontations
Maybe that’s another reason why I love roaming around.
Confronting yourself leads to knowing yourself
You are shown exactly who you are and what kind of biases and conditionings you have
Many a times, things are casually presented to you, things that are completely opposite
to what you know as true
These uncomfortable situations show you who you really are
I live in a quiet town in Southern China.
The experience you see are my travels from China to Vietnam and Thailand, in the height
of this crisis
Actually, I didn’t know about it until I boarded my flight
This unique situation provided confrontations and conflicts within myself, that helped reveal
a part of me that I didn’t know exist
As human beings, I feel like we are an extremely cautious bunch
Extreme caution many a times morphs into this unfounded fear
When I lived in Canada, I’ve encountered a lot of these cautious people
Afraid of talking to one another, afraid of a friendly hi, afraid to smile, afraid of
a new person, afraid of a new culture, afraid of asking ‘can we be friends’, afraid
of asking someone out, afraid of the unknown and stepping out of one’s own comfort zone
in general
I am guilty of this myself
But I’d like to think it has changed a little bit
There is this incredible quote from Frank Hebert’s 1965 Science Fiction epic novel
Dune
“I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.”
But to attain this state, I find, it is not easy
But the confrontations and conflicts provided by travelling far and wide helps out quite a bit
When walking through a market, in a very small town, in an unknown country, where you don’t
understand a single word spoken, nor the store signs
Now, that makes you act despite of the fear
That makes you alert, and face enough of those situations, you realize that people are people,
regardless of where they are
More often than not, we all want to get through the day peacefully, bring food to the table,
survive another day, and if possible, make meaningful connections along the way
I was standing in the middle of this deserted street, in this small town in Vietnam
Apart from the distant singing somewhere in the night and the ominous car in front of
me, there was nothing else going on.
Everything in my instinct was telling me to get out of this street.
But I find that instinct and conditional fear of unknown, has only the slightest of difference
But when I breathed in and out, and looked around, I realized that it actually is a nice
residential street
People were watching TV inside their houses, children were playing inside, and I realized
that it was my fear of unknown and not my instinct.
But don’t get me wrong.
Travelling and living in a foreign place is often lonely and alienating
There were countless nights, when I’d wake up in the middle of the night, stand in my
balcony, looking out into the night, looking at all the sleepy apartments, empty streets
and closed shops, wondering, what am I doing with my life, wondering what could have been
if I had never left home
But the reward far outweighs these occasional discomforts, at least in my case
The suffering, the travels, the late nights, the heartbreaks, the missed trains, the people
I met during this past decade, shaped me into who I am today
And with that, I can honestly say, I have no regrets
I am very aware of the fact that I haven’t found my home yet.
Probably I never will
But lately I’ve been enjoying this very search for home
This journey towards my home is proving to be much more fulfilling
than the promise of being there someday.