We’re heading homeward.
“Now I’ll head towards home,” the man on the street said the other day. “Me too!” I wanted to shout. “We all are,” I would have added, in hindsight.
But before that, I had found it odd: why would he head “towards home”, and not “home”? You either go home, or you do not. This seemed begging for me to stamp “strange but amusing” on it and call it a day. Next I came back to the world. With my tired eyes I surveyed the area. And then all of a sudden I felt what that man had meant–we are going towards home.
I eyed the faces, stores, and peanut shop’s burning tinder–masked, drab, and dim–and understood. It took little focus to realize that I had been blind. We are all heading towards home, me included. A lone blue mask lay aground, making me realize there was one on my face. And I smiled at my folly, though none is the wiser.
“Towards home” reminds me of my three homes.
As I stood there waiting on a delivery, I thought of the heaps of homework I’d left back home. I couldn’t wait to get back and sit back to do it correctly, after months. As the authorities have faced few more challenging times, homework hadn’t been their top priority. With the pen in my hand, I’d felt normal, but a doubt that normal was far had overwhelmed me. As I waited on this man–10 minutes late–I reflected on that feeling. I feel that the boring wait would’ve justified counting backwards as a fun pastime.
The third home
Regardless, my third home–and ours–is the one we’d come out of. For long, we’ve been inactive in the truest sense as we’d then come out of the Eid al-Adha vacation. It had been a workless and bland holiday without cheer. Besides, it had felt comical to try to tell apart our vacation from the backdrop of an extended movement control order. Regardless, nature demands a certain attitude from man: man must rise above. And so we got through a terrible vacation and back to our second home–still quarantined.
The first home
Our second home is so unwelcoming that it does not deserve this spot–so let us reminisce on our first. This feeling had gripped me when that feather light pen felt like it bore cosmic energy. That was the closest I’d been to my first home–comfort zone that a sweep of bad clouds’ obscured. All the scratch and scrawl I’d then jotted spell one thing–hope. The rusty computer worked; I was calm; and waves of newfound motivation had left me feeling like a hero. We could use one or two.
The unpleasant second home
That our first home had been so close had left me feeling like a fool. I’d wondered why I hadn’t got back on track sooner. Thus, I discovered that our subconscious makes every choice, and that home is where it wants. I was getting anxious, and the threat from mosquitoes was intensifying. So I stood with my arms crossed, my legs raring to go. For I needed to transit from my third to second home.
That man was right: the way homeward goes through the second home. Knowing this impelled me to go back and finish my homework; for I wanted everything to normalize soon.
Motivation to study transferred me to our unfortunate home.
To get from place to place, man needs vehicle. The vehicle in my case is settling in in familiar environment. As said earlier, my subconscious mind does the rest. So I am back to my second home, but this time I may hop to my first.
This pandemic’s taken a toll, but the key to uplifting the bans on our lives lies within reach. No, we must not gather round the bonfire or crowd the city streets yet. Rather, I am talking of the crowd in our head–thoughts clouding the subconscious. But, to our luck, the subconscious is the dormant beast that acts based on what the conscious sees and hears. It does not decide; it reacts. It does what it needs to do to meet the expectations set by our conscious mind. Dr. Joseph Murphy best says it in The Power of Your Subconscious Mind:
Just keep your conscious mind busy with expectation of the best.
If we rid our subconscious of negative thoughts and just notice the beauty in things, we can feel at home. I found peace in study, for it reminded me of my wont before this all. Yours: gaming, spear fishing, or leading, etc.; sadly, we can’t all revert to our old lives. That’s why you “head towards home”.
Crescendo
When the guy–my uncle’s friend–finally came, I did not care what it was that he gave me. I had plans in my mind: I needed to sit down to study, even for half an hour. As I set foot homeward, my mind wandered off into the horizon, looking for a trace of that odd man. I wonder if he is close to home yet.
