Part 6: Foreign and Familiar
You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith and hope.
― Thomas Merton
If we are open only to discoveries which will accord with what we know already, we may as well stay shut.
— Alan Watts
It’s hard to find a word for it.
It's like nostalgia, not for some time in the past or in the future, but for the moment you’re already in.
A “now nostalgia?"
Or maybe it’s almost like whatever the opposite of what “homesickness” is?
It is not so much a “wanderlust,” which is more about the romanticized yearning for a new experience, but a kind of de-ja-vu to the sheer experience of experience.
Instead of missing a “home” that is in a distant past or future, it's the discovery or remembrance of the sheer nearness of a “home” that is accessible at any given moment. The “home-ness” of now, of the present.
No, that’s not it, either.
There really is no word precise enough for this “now nostalgia.”
It is one of the strangest and yet most delightful experiences I have come to know in life. It is that inexplicable feeling of being surprisingly at home in completely unrecognizable, unfamiliar, and entirely obscure and foreign places.
Like the time Raghu and I decided to travel to Amsterdam for Easter weekend.
