Musings
"Home" --- while travelling
A couple of months ago, I went to Jordan to research for my senior thesis on Palestinian refugees and I wanted to come back not only with a wealth of academic information, but also a sharper, more worldly viewpoint. After all, no book, television show or blog quite replaced the lessons on the 3 P's --- people, politics and power --- as stepping foot on to a new land could teach. In my free time, I wandered like a Lion King character around the kingdom of Jordan. I was in love, combing through the homogeneity of Ammani stone buildings, cascading roads and Roman ruins with a heightened sense of feeling and a ready acceptability to all sorts of experience. Despite the high, I realized an unlikely similarity between "home" and abroad/travel. Travel allows a feeling that seems similar to the eerie warmth you sense when an old song from childhood starts playing on the radio, or when you smell the whiff of your mother's cooking after a long time. It is the feeling that you feel when you are nostalgic. Nostalgia is a wistfully positive feeling. But it draws out a sense of gloom shortly afterwards, when through the youth vanished, innocence eroded, positivity clouded, we are reminded of mortality. The past is irretrievable. And so was my Jordanian adventure, a sweet but mortal experience. No matter how delectable each moment was, it would inevitably fade. Like home, it is impossible to clutch at its straws. And just like that, home and travel become so similar. Both promise to exile us from a warm past. Travel demands that we understand the contrast between complete control over the external self and absence of the regular levers of control you have at "home". But within a short span of time, while travelling alone, I realized there was nothing like the sweetness of contrast travel throws upon us. Allow me to explain --- we are very much in control of our lives during travelling, in a way that appears quite arcane while we are immersed in the humdrum of daily existence. We might be on a budget, but we spend on what makes us smile, whether it's a cup of Turkish coffee or a ridiculously expensive entry fee to Petra, Jordan. Yet we cannot boil a pot of cha whenever, or frown freely at the annoying landlord, or save transport costs because the directions are still unfamiliar and the local language is still un-mastered. But because of that you begin to grow, in ways that the fuzziness of home disallows. But realizing this very sweetness of contrast makes the challenge of stepping out of the comfort zone a pleasurable experience. And that sweetness lies in acknowledging that there are straws to clutch in a potentially discomforting situation. There's a myriad of ways Murphy's Law can kick in during travels, with or without your local magazine's luminous horoscope predictions. It reminds us of home where we seem to have a better grip over our surroundings. And when we think of "being in control of your life" we tend to associate with a few basic themes that fluctuate, depending on the environmental cues available --- self-confidence from the freedom of time in the bathroom, the people you can choose to be exposed to, the ability to control where you would go depending on moods (yes, for many people it IS an issue!), i.e., controlling the harvests of luck. We associate these themes with short to medium term. But are we really in control of that much when we lived with our parents in our first home? And is that something that makes our first home taste different from the second "crib" we arranged for our convenience and age? Somewhere in the cascades of Amman roads --- the kindness of my supervisor's generosity, the warmth of my new friends' eagerness to help me, the softness of my new friend Hajar's lessons on Middle Eastern cooking and Arabic --- I found the former kind of home in Amman in a most unexpected way. I would not go far enough to say, this is and will be my new home; home is too indefinable and eludes prolonged exposure. But I can define what Amman now means to me. Actually, maybe not. Perhaps it is simply the place which has taught me how to take a look at the world outside my books, internet, television and conversations with people, whether they were expatriates or whether they were locals. I never realized that in Bangladesh, somewhat did in the USA, found much clarity in Amman. And the greediness to learn how to learn from places-and-people is finally kicking in. Just like home, my personal evolution harbored here at Amman. It was Amman for me, will be a different place for a different person. So go out, back-pack and see the world. And come back next week to hear a bit more about Jordan. Cheers!
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