Skip to main content

Solastalgia

It used to be that you could come home to where you were born and raised after however many years and still find the world you had left behind. Then there were changes, people you knew were displaced for reasons often beyond their control, new landmarks had begun to replace the old. Friends from long ago were harder to find, as were other memories of childhood - the school, the corner-store, a tree outside your window that had been around for longer than anyone could remember. So, there was no place that was truly home.

For those of us who have lived the better parts of our lives as vagabonds without a permanent address, this lack of of a real home and the associated pain is a familiar one. We look forward to putting roots down someplace just so we have place to come back to, be comforted by the presence of familiar things around us. That may be harder to come by with time. There is now a word to describe the complex emotions associated with this.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…
Hello,

Your blog is making news. Reema, a popular blogger, has just mentioned in her latest post how she was surprised by the chime! You can read it here. I have submitted a comment on her blog on how I love your blog.:)

P.S.: This comment is here is out of place. Feel free to delete it. I was running short of time; hence here! Don't mind.
11:11 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...
Post a Comment
Read more