A journey of self-discovery is supposed to be grand. Full of romantic ideals of what it means to rediscover one's lost self. It involves mystics and spiritual teachers and time spent in reverent meditation. It involves sacrifice. This is what my mind presents to me when I plan in any detail my own journey, which I am now less than one month away from starting. And what I have planned feels like cheating. I won't be spending 3 months in silent meditation at a Vipassani ashram. After long years of working so hard at being someone else, I don't have the energy left in me to build schools in Papua New Guinea. While I've started re-learning my mostly forgotten high-school French, I lack the passion for and devotion to the language to park myself in a home-stay in Burgundy to properly unpick it's layers.
Instead, my journey of self-discovery means going home. It means re-accustoming myself to an accent that is my own, but that now sounds foreign to me. It means spending long hours driving in countryside that I hope will strike a balance of familiarity and newness. And most importantly, it means unearthing my own roots in the hope that my lost self is tangled amongst them.
In the spirit of returning to roots, I'm reviving this old blog, albeit having given it a slight face-lift. It will be nice to have something familiar on this unfamiliar journey.
Friday, March 28, 2008
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