During this recent trip to the land of my birth, I visited many people. These are people I see once, maybe twice, in a year. It is an interesting experience to pop into vignettes of my former life. Living and working in another country brings with it many new perspectives, and these are thrown right up in my face when I visit my homeland.
So much of a culture of a place is imbedded in the normal ways people manoeuvre through everyday life and is very hard to detect from within it. At least it was for me. Even though I was well travelled prior to moving, it took the act of everyday living to trigger a true awareness in me. No amount of pretending to be a resident even came close, and I did dabble in such pretences.
At first, the new perspective revealed itself as frustration when an invisible force, which appeared out of nowhere, scuppered what should be very simple tasks. At some point, I started to figure it out. But my mind kept grasping for its former expectations, resistant to the delicate complexities that all realities are composed of, whether we want them to be or not. Eventually, I started to perceive the new reality, which led to seeing my former one differently. During visits to my homeland, the culture of that place as a separate thing started to emerge.
What I saw is hard to describe. I have to call it: an underlying sense of panic that is woven into everything, which I could not see when I was embedded in it. It took years to untangle it from inside me so that it became visible, but now it is so obvious. Some boogieman is always lurking and is going to… kill me, kidnap my children, take away my rights, snatch up my possessions, steal my place in the traffic, wreak havoc with my routine: all with a myopic sense of urgency grossly misaligned with the actual danger or consequence. My love for my homeland is unconditional and unending, but the relentless undercurrent of panic is exhausting. It will be interesting to see how long it takes for me to rejoin it.
Photo Credit: Squirrel Farts Drink Blog
Photo Credit: Squirrel Farts Drink Blog
