A time to find home

We step out of our homes, not too often. At most times never. When we do venture out in the odd instance, we stay too close and take the care to never stray too far. It is an invisible thread, one that you need to hold on to, so you could trace your steps back home. The thread looks like it strings spaces together, so we can find our way back home. But the thread also strings time — if we don’t get back home soon enough, there may be no home, at least, the way we left it.

The thread is infinite and you could keep going, but so is the fear. It is safer to be tethered than to be free, for to be free is to be lost. To be free is to lose.

So we step out diffidently, maybe even timorously.

There are different days. And different ways in which we feel about ourselves. There are days when we feel small and insignificant — on those days, the vastness that the infinite thread leads us into, intimidates us and makes us recoil back instantaneously. There are other days when we feel grand and heroic — and we find the thread inviting us, even prodding us. On other days, when we feel asphyxiated and seek to break free, it even provokes us with better possibilities. We would be greatly fortunate to have any of these feelings, for it presents us with a possibility that we could step out of our homes.

Unfortunately, we don’t feel small or heroic or asphyxiated on most days. We feel automated. On most days, we are tethered to routines with their different costumes. Like Focus. Like Relationships. Like Responsibilities. Like Contentment. Like Age…..The costumes make the act of being tethered worthwhile. Even glorious.

If we are lucky, there comes a time, when the routine is upstaged and its deceptive costumes, stripped out. This is a period of fear. It is a time, when we feel small or insignificant, grand or heroic, imprisoned, or asphyxiated. Take your pick. The threads start to tug at us all over again. Asking us to cross the thresholds and leave our homes. The thread is infinite. And there are infinite threads.

What may give us the courage in submitting to these threads, is the realization that we carry our homes with us. Or knowing that, maybe what we can carry with us, is what is home. And when we do so, our homes become us, rich and throbbing like the universe. Else they may just be hideouts. One among the many.

Pic: Threshold. Visalam in Karaikudi.