That Reset Button Called Home
After close to 26 months, I found myself boarding a connecting flight from Washington DC to Doha enroute to Chennai. Sure, I can go on about how those 26 months felt, 24 of which I was pretty much trapped and locked away from my own home in Chennai. But that is a beaten path and I’m sure we all, at some point, want to move on from those two years and so do I. It felt quite surreal boarding that flight. Up until the moment I fastened the seatbelt, I did not believe that I would be traveling. I kept expecting a situation to arise that kept me from visiting Chennai and I was thoroughly surprised that I did end up on that flight. Such has the unpredictability of the last two years taken toll on my whole belief system.
During the last few days before I left for Philadelphia for the very first time in 2017, my brother had a word of advice for me —
“From the day you step out of your home, you start living two lives — one at home and one outside home. The two lives can never simultaneously run but can have causal effects on one another. And each time you leave one of these places, that life pauses and the other life resumes from where you left it.”
I believe this applies irrespective of how away and different from home that second life is. The biggest challenge is to make both these lives exciting, interesting and possibly successful — successful to our own eyes, at least.
It took a while for me to feel at home. Not too long though, about 20 minutes. Between immigration and the baggage carousel, there was a line where carry-on bags were run through a scanner. As I was placing my backpack in the scanner, I was stopped. An officer asked me to remove all electronic items. I assumed I would be asked to place them in the scanner separately. But he asked me to walk with all the electronics to the other side to collect my scanned backpack. When asked for the reasoning behind this, he said and I quote, “if your electronics go missing, we don’t want you to blame us — by having you hold on to them, any problems with regards to your belongings is on you.” Somewhere between people fearing airport officials and airport officials fearing people, the life switch was complete.
Home helps. It could be the people in your home, the people around your home or even the sheer familiarity of the place. If nothing, returning home after a long time creates a time warp that helps put certain parts of our lives in perspective.
People around me, those I grew up with or watching, seem to have moved on from where I saw them last time around. So has the city, the neighborhood and even the sewage system. And here I was, feeling quite the same as I did back then, unable to fathom the changes around what should have been a pause button on the whole world (full of myself, right?). Until the causal effects hit.
How would it feel if you could put the differences between phases of your life, inner beliefs and your perception of the world in a well defined “before and after” format? These causal effects provide you with that direct comparison. The overwhelming wave of self-awareness that could lead to a feeling of not knowing who you really are and a sudden imposter syndrome when people around you mistake you for the person you were the last time you met them, is very real and in a weird way, can be quite grounding.
Spots on a leopard never change. There are spots and there are scars. All you need is a mirror to find the scars from the spots. The blatant comparisons put me in front of that mirror and compelled me to look for my spots. Not easy at all but having home ground advantage helps, a lot.
Being home also provides that extra self confidence because you know you have won in these conditions before — as small as the victory could be, it still counts and it still adds to your confidence. That confidence gives you a chance at resetting — you can’t reset your scars but you can reset your inner strength, you can’t reset your reality but you can reset your outlook, you can’t reset your life to the past but maybe you can reset your confidence to handle that life differently.
All this while, when I said home, I meant my home in Chennai. But it could mean something else to you. It could be away from your childhood home. It could be anywhere. It could be anything that makes you feel this way. Ultimately, home is just a state of mind. It is what you relate to when you read this. And whatever hits you when you read this, I hope you never let that go because until there is a home or a promise of a home, there is hope and that chance of a reset is always around the corner.
I’m finishing this article with a few lines from the famous theme song of the hit American sitcom, Cheers —
Making your way in the world today
Takes everything you’ve got
Taking a break from all your worries
Sure would help a lot
Wouldn’t you like to get away?
Sometimes you want to go
Where everybody knows your name
And they’re always glad you came
You want to be where you can see
Our troubles are all the same
You want to be where everybody knows your name
