Finding Home in the Unfamiliar

Grab your backpack,

get on a bus,

get on a train,

get on another bus,

get off that bus to wait for a different bus.

Wait. Wait. Wait.

Decide to walk, just to wait again.

Wait for what?

A falling tide.

Find a bathroom, then a market.

Buy a melon ice-pop, or two, and wait outside.

Look around to see a sidewalk rising slowly from a road going out into the sea.

The open water turned to marsh, stretching to the horizon, as you march.

Giant turbines out before you, a hang glider zips by you.

You see a bus that’s mostly rust, speeding past these glorious sights.

You think how lucky you must be.

You walk until you feel like you’ve gone where you wanted to go.

You walk until the moon rise is high in the sky,

While the sun sets-out it’s last light.

You watch as the day turns to the night.

Getting a picture of what it felt like to be there, that night.

Turning home to see fireworks sparkling on the beach.

Finding a hose to rinse the mud from your feet.

Walking until it’s time to wait.

Happy to see a bus that’s mostly rust.

Getting off at a stop with a market.

Go to the market, miss the next bus.

Wait for the next, next bus with Bugles and chocolate milk.

You spill the Bugles all over the bus-stop pathway,

But you still have the chocolate milk.

No matter where you go, there is always a small piece of home waiting to be found. You will find home in unexpected places, without even trying. You’ll be walking around some far away place, feeling slightly lost and exhilarated.

Then something strikes you about the architecture of the building, the song coming through the speakers, or the touch of a shirt sleeve between two fingers. The known overcomes you and that feeling of lost turns to right.

Once it starts to happen, it will happen often and more frequently. Until the far away places you travel, start feeling like not so far away places at all. Once you’ve traveled far and wide, every place will have a home for you to find.

Every place has similarities to another. Life follows patterns in the most essential of forms. Finding the familiar within the foreign is the best way to acclimate yourself to the overwhelming unknown, laid out before you.

It’s seems to be our natural tendency to find the differences in all things. Something that can be useful, but when taken to the extremes, capable of creating unnecessary boundaries and unneeded pain.

It seems vital to remember, while differences make us unique and contribute to the varied perspectives of existence, our universalities are what make-up the most significant qualities of our species.

The things that we all must do, to keep going. We breath, we sleep, we move from point A to B, we love, we desire to be part of something that proves we are significant in whatever way we find to be most inspiring.

While no two paths are the same, each path contains sky above and ground below with only one direction to go. We are all living varying degrees of the same life. To see the bigger picture, find how the pieces connect.

Have you ever taken a breath and felt as though you were in a place other than the place you were? One minute your standing in a furniture store picking out a new couch, the next inhale your in Disney World. Everything smells fabricated and it’s magical.

Smell is the sense most closely linked to memories. A truly astounding accomplishment performed by an organ that is responsible for everything you do and are. Capable of bring back the memory of the happiest place on earth with just one sniff.

It’s your minds reaction to an event which possessed a particular aroma that now holds your memory. There are somethings you will always remember, at any inopportune moment, through no credit or fault of your own. Well, not consciously.

It’s likely you dislike a smell because it’s linked to a negative emotional reaction in the past. Your brain doesn’t need to remember the specific event to recall the emotion it produced, all from a single breathe. Every whiff is a trip through time.

Amazing that your brain is making choices for you, triggering responses to your surroundings that you are only mildly conscious of, at best. Further reiterating the fact that everything is connected, regardless of if you choose to recognize the connections.

There is a particular kind of perfume that makes me sick to my stomach because it reminds me of the first daycare I was taken to, where I would bit my finger until they bled. My brain just does that because it can, and I can’t tell it not too.

Knowing this means you can reengineer your emotions through smell, breath in that which evokes the feelings you aspire to have and avoid that which causes you harm. Not the simplest task, never knowing what the wind will blow in.

Life is a constant bombardement of things happening to you on every conceivable level, but knowledge is the first step to change. It helps to remember that there’s a reason for everything, it’s up to us to discover why.