This is Home?
Looking out my window over the smoggy rows of high-rise after high-rise, my heart felt unsettled. “Why am I here? Is this really home?” I thought. Digging up nostalgic memories from my childhood and scrolling through “country fall” posts (yes, my desperate search) on Pinterest had also not helped this feeling.
I have learned this past year living on the 22nd floor of a high-rise in a city of 10+ million people, that a part of me starts to get deeply unsettled in the city. When I was younger I never thought I would have said this, but I adore the country and its slowness.
Somedays I feel that the only resemblance of the home I love back in the States is the little cart selling some sort of cake thing outside our complex, who shouts from a megaphone so loud you can hear it all the way up on our 22nd floor, “It’sssss a fieldddd goalllllll!” … or at least that’s what I hear in the jumbled foreign language. Ha! It brings me right back to those Friday night football games.
I treasure those nostalgic memories and I get such excitement in dreaming for what is to come! Yet, I have a deeper rooted problem with always waiting for perfection and I feel that in the “unsettledness” today. Maybe I want to be home again with my family and maybe I want to live in the country and have a house that resembles my “Future Home” Pinterest board… but I don’t have it perfectly now and it can keep me from thankfulness. I dream of this blog and what I want it to look like, and dreaming too far can paralyze me. I want it to look such and such a way and give such and such a feel and I become paralyzed from even starting something that is still good without the perfection.
Does it ever paralyze you? Does the waiting for perfection keep you from being thankful for the present or unable to move forward?
What are we waiting for?
In the past I used to dream for my present – thinking of all the adventure I would have and all that I would experience, and many of those dreams have come true. Oh, my forgetful heart, may your remember! And in writing this post, may you embrace the dreams come true and the imperfections in your little home. And in looking around and naming the wonders you can be thankful for, may you embrace the present in a way that urges you on into the future with hope and gratitude.
So, for now, I will settle for “It’ssssss a fieldddddddd goalllllllll!” to give me a sense of home, because this little apartment rising above the city is my little drop of sweetness – my sweet home.
“Home is not simply a mark upon a map, anymore than a river is just water. It is the place at the center of the compass from which every arrow radiates and where the heart is fixed. It is a force that forever draws us back or lures us on. For where the home is, there lies hope, and the future waits and everything is possible.”
– call the midwife
