The clock in my room, the dusty white electronic little thing with two alarm settings and an inbuilt radio, stood unceremoniously, stationary on the left side of my bed, feeding energy through the mains, and yet, it moved, continuously, restlessly, from one second to another, no respite. As I write, I feel like that clock, or at least I aspire to be like it, in constant, never ending motion.
I've moved all my life, not staying put in a place for a great majority of my life, exploring places, cultures, understanding and mingling with people and their ideas, almost like a lucky nomad in a stationary hamster-ed world.
Recently, moving apartments after 7 years staying at a single base, the longest I’ve ever stayed put, taking stock of all that I owned, I realised of my meagre dispositions. All of my clothes and shoes, that I need against the elements, fit easily into a medium suitcase and a haversack. The only other things of note were the following - my books, some read, others future candidates, all ear marked, travellers in their own right, of unknown lineages. Books that I didn’t really need to carry, but I did in hope of a good barter at a book exchange, and so they all tagged along; A few utensils, the bare necessities, that make do, a filter coffee machine that served as fuel for my sedentary desk based weekdays, and propulsion for the traveling adventures on the weekends; A second hand television, an outdated LCD that served its purpose of transmitting entertainment and knowledge across the wire and into our stimulus hungry brains. The alarm clock also came along, because it had over time synced with my body clock, and had been a slightly loud, sometimes annoying, but never complaining, and ever punctual pre dawn companion. And this was all. If there was anything else it was all temporal, replaceable, that could be left behind, and/or arranged in the new dwelling.
And with all of these belongings, there was no attachment. Let that statement alone sink in for a while. No attachment, not with the house, nor the locality, the community, or familiar paths, and not with the things I had left behind. I had learnt, from all of them, experienced and understood the locals, their culture and their lifestyle, and intrinsically had inculcated ideas and concepts from these experiences, and added a few overflowing pages to my biography, that made for satisfying reading. But in the end, there was no attachment, no emotion, nothing that held me back. In the new place, it was the same Sun, the same Moon, the same sky. The people, the birds, the animals, the trees, the parks and their paths, the roads and the cars that plied on them, my running route, the weather had all changed, but they offered their own new perspective, their own stories, challenges, ideas, concepts and culture.
And this realisation of the fact that all that I owned fit effortlessly into a suitcase and a haversack, with no attachments, was incredibly profound, and it afforded a sense of euphoric calming liberation - I am free, of any chains, for I don’t belong, not bound to a place and its ideas like other settled inhabitants, much like my clock that rides the analog waves from one moment to another, no feelings, no attachments, only taking along the experience of having lived that moment. Is there a need to call a place home I wondered? Can it not be such that home is where you are? Why get tied down to a geographical location, why belong? Why limit yourself to a demographic, why get comfortable? What is the incentive to settle? Who decides where one must settle - is it determined by your lineage, your family home, or is it a decision taken at a later point in life based on experience, and what dictates that decision? The need to have a safe dwelling resonates - somewhere you can get back to; but to stay put in that one place, the one city, the same community, even country for life, only taking vacations, if at all, in this corporate world, for a couple of weeks a year to explore what else exists beyond your ‘home’?
Are you a function of your surroundings, the community, your home, what you own, your materialistic acquisitions - your car, the fancy apartment with its top of the line television, the double door fridge, the smart washing machine, the Alexa on the counter, the swimming pool in your vicinity, your high end locality? Is that who you are?
Or are you a function of your experiences, what you’ve seen and where you’ve been, who you’ve met, your stories, the ideas, concepts, cultures and influences that you’ve picked up along the way, and in return the ones you’ve shared and propagated?
The latter, I believe is universally true for all, in at least a partial capacity, the remainder taken up by the former. These two concepts sit on polarising ends of the spectrum, and settlers lie closer to materialistic acquisitions, and the nomads carry with them only what they need with their stories and experiences tagging along, the necessities come and go. And at that moment, I felt like a nomad, with no baggage, no chains, nothing to call mine, that I could be anywhere, do anything, leave for a new destination at the drop of a hat, with almost a naive confidence on my universal employability in this economy that for many runs mostly on a stable internet connection, a trait that allows and serves as a pre-cursor to such nomadic aspirations. Many animals and birds choose to travel, in search of food, shelter, greener pastures and better hopes of survival and reproduction, through the seasons, and some stay in the same vicinity of their birth, and so, like us, animals remain undecided on how they must live, to move or to settle. And we, as humans, are better equipped to travel, to move; generations after generations have iterated tirelessly on more and more efficient modes of travel. And we should travel, to not look for greener pastures however, or for food, but to simply satiate our curiosity of this planet where we are born, probably once, for limited revolutions around the sun; curiosity of all that grows, lives, breathes and exists on the surface of the Earth. That alone is incentive enough to not settle, to transcend the man made concepts of countries, and to explore, continuously, without a notion of settling, until the very end of our existence. Both ends of the spectrum make sense, but what can I say? I guess I have nomadic tendencies.
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