I got home a few days ago, to the quiet roads of Toronto. To the home with reliable hot running water. To quiet mornings and quiet nights.
But it seems the tumultuous Egyptian landscape has followed me home. Internalized chaos I suppose. I didn't quite notice I had any conflicting or chaotic feelings when I was there. Mostly because there was so much external chaos that the internal didn't quite show.
I thought coming back to Toronto would be this immense relief. A load off of my mind and heart. But it isn't quite what I hoped for.
They say home is where the heart is. I used to look for my home in physical places. I used to think that familiar surroundings and in-depth knowledge of how things around me function, constituted a "home." I'm starting to see that I'm wrong.
Don't think that it's a simple question of whether my home is in Egypt or in Canada. Physical space and landscape is relatively irrelevant in the grand scheme. It's not about countries. It's more complicated than that. Home is about love and people.
And then the natural question that follows is: if your "home" disappoints you, how do you just get up and find another? Relocating your body is easy. It's the relocation of your heart that's the hard part.
5 comments:
is "home" ever a constant then?
I don't think it is.
In some medieval Muslim writings on philosophical psychology, we find the heart discussed as an aspect of our perceptive faculty and a vessel of knowledge--in other words--not a physical entity. When we physically die, this "heart" remains able to perceive. In a sense, it might be said that since the heart is not a physical entity, since it is not OF the world, it cannot ever truly be at home anywhere in the physical world (unless it becomes "unhealthy" and cover over by or preoccupied the world).
This seems to be what some earlier Muslims seemed to think. I don't know.
Rizwan, I'm a simple girl.
Yeah right. Very funny =)
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