I am home walking the familiar streets where I grew up. A year is nothing in the time scale and this is not the first time I have been away from home for a year. Yet it’s a bit different. Adaptability is always something that I have taken pride in, given the fact that I have been in and out of home since fourteen. But my father tells me, adaptability is not only being able to go out and mingle in different places with people from different nationalities. He says it is also the ability to come back to your roots and realize that you have come home. That no matter what I have seen and done, I should go back to my town without feeling uneasy and be able to laugh with the old man from my village when he laughs.
The change is drastic. Seoul has its high rises, automated everything and busy traffic on its good roads. One of the larger metropolitan cities of the OECD world, over 10 million people move around the city and the energy can be felt daily. The city draws Koreans and expats to restaurants, bars and pubs weekend after weekend, and it is quite true that one can be in Seoul for years and know nothing more of Korea besides Seoul. I am one of the nagging voices, having tried to convince my friends that the Korea I love is outside the metropolis and that the adventure lies beyond. I am scared that I might become one of the many who have been sucked into the city life with no desire to breathe the cool mint-fresh air of the mountains and the countryside. You’ll get used to it, they all say.
I took a walk with my brother down memory lane to the first house I remember. It still stands, not too far from the house we live in now. We walk to the front of the house and laugh, instantly recalling things we did. The cricket pitch now looks very small and what I thought was a big garden wasn’t really big. In fact, there’s a big building both in front and back, hemming in the small government quarters I once called home. As I meet my uncles, aunts and cousins, I feel the impact of time and that one year has done quite a bit to relationships. I wouldn’t want me to slide from laughter to a formal smile to just a nod. I know the onus is on me to keep relationships alive and well. Life is about relationships after all, and that firm relationships give a sense of confidence and add to one’s identity.
I wander around Kohima with gratefulness in my heart- that after years of being out of home, I can still come back and not feel like a stranger, that I can meet an old friend in the street and laugh at old jokes, that I am equally at home even if I don’t have the comforts of Seoul, that I can visit old neighbours and talk with them over tea in steel cups of old. Most of all, I am grateful there’s no pretense. I suppose that in writing this, I am trying to remind myself again that it is I who must make that extra effort to seize each day, each moment.
After a year in the metropolis, I have come to admire simplicity even more. I am convinced that the true measure of a person can be seen when the comforts of this world don’t disable the ability to live meaningfully with less. Having more may not be bad but wanting more, forgetting others who have less or who don’t have is surely the edge of the cliff. These visits home remind of that. It reminds me of my roots and what we didn’t have so that I can be grateful for what I have now, without holding on to it because it really isn’t mine to hold.
“…for apart from me, you can do nothing.” John 15:5
The Yearning. 