To Be or Not To Be

A little kingdom I possess,
Where thoughts and feelings dwell;
And very hard the task I find
Of governing it well.
~ Louisa May Alcott

...that more or less describes my situation!

~A Wise Man Said~

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
~ Aristotle
Sunday, July 07, 2019
 

I remarked in a previous post how I felt more at home in Lancaster than in London and that it might have to do with my familiarity with Lancaster or it could be the quiet and serenity of Lancaster with the opportunity for mental stimulation and contemplation as opposed to the hustle and bustle of London with its distractions and diversions.
I realised something about myself during another trip, this time to Scotland, which was far closer in its aspects to Lancaster. It had nothing to do with the trip itself but more to do with myself… and perhaps to do with this older version of myself (I can’t be certain of that though). I feel that though I think of myself as someone who likes to travel and explore towns and cultures, I probably don’t mean ‘travel’ as most people do. I guess to me the enjoyable part of the travel is not so much in the actual ‘travelling’ but in the settling in enough to find some sort of comfortable rhythm and routine in new surroundings with new things to get used to that gradually slip into my new albeit temporary way of life. Obviously sooner or later one must move from this new place if it is to count as ‘travel’ but that time doesn’t come so soon that one is ‘travelling’ all the time or living out of a suitcase so to speak. In this sense, perhaps I don’t really like what people mean by ‘travelling’ because it is akin to simply observing at a distance whether it is a place or a culture and not getting immersed in it or absorbed by it or transformed through it in any way at all. The ‘travel’ that I find interesting and enjoyable happens at the point where it loses its novelty and becomes an everyday experience that one actually ‘lives’…an everyday experience that has opportunities galore for stimulation and edification… be it the local markets, the language, the forms of address, the accidental conversations, the by-lanes, the shops, the smells… any number of things that are never revealed through the process of merely ‘travelling’ or passing by.
This perhaps explains why the places I have enjoyed ‘travelling’ to the most are the ones that I have spent at least some amount of time in. It’s as if I got to know them well rather than merely made a passing acquaintance and while one can say one might have liked an acquaintance better if only one knew them better, it is difficult to like them more than those you do know well and like well. It also explains something I find difficult to explain many a times, the fact that when I go home for the holidays, whether it is India or now Dubai (if home is where the family is), I prefer to be gone for at least a month. I like to have enough time to wear off the novelty and to settle into a routine. It is only when I have settled into the rhythm of a routine, almost forgotten my former one, do I start enjoying the ‘travel’ or enjoying the feeling of being ‘at home’. If I were to be home for a week, I would only feel like I was ‘travelling’… and as I have come to realise, I do not really enjoy ‘travelling’… I enjoy and find it exciting to be ‘at home’… and it takes a little time to get there when one has just arrived… 

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 1:56 am 0 comments
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