I am at home for an extended period after a long time. It's a great feeling, but also a feeling full of surprises.
Even something as definitive as a family starts to blur out if one stays for far too long outside. Friends and acquaintances blur too, but there is a difference. Difference lies in that even though I didn't like losing touch with some of them, I was prepared and hence better adjusted for the process. When it started happening, I acknowledged it, took efforts in maintaining touch, and eventually settled down in a practical concoction of feelings for them and efforts required to maintain those feelings. So, if the blurring happened, it was a conscious blurring. I was aware.
Family was such a given, that I didn't realise that blurring could ever happen. For me, they had fixed roles of being a parent or a grandparent. They all had such stable roles and personalities in my mind that it absolutely escaped me that they must be responding to the passage of time just as I did, modulating themselves to cope and thrive, and that in the process some of their old selves might have disappeared, and they may have picked up some new habits, too.
So when I see the same old face speaking a new thought, same old body performing a new behaviour, same old person sheltering a new mind, I stare and gape.
The mind is currently vacillating between eager curiosity, missing the older versions and plain indifference.
Even something as definitive as a family starts to blur out if one stays for far too long outside. Friends and acquaintances blur too, but there is a difference. Difference lies in that even though I didn't like losing touch with some of them, I was prepared and hence better adjusted for the process. When it started happening, I acknowledged it, took efforts in maintaining touch, and eventually settled down in a practical concoction of feelings for them and efforts required to maintain those feelings. So, if the blurring happened, it was a conscious blurring. I was aware.
Family was such a given, that I didn't realise that blurring could ever happen. For me, they had fixed roles of being a parent or a grandparent. They all had such stable roles and personalities in my mind that it absolutely escaped me that they must be responding to the passage of time just as I did, modulating themselves to cope and thrive, and that in the process some of their old selves might have disappeared, and they may have picked up some new habits, too.
So when I see the same old face speaking a new thought, same old body performing a new behaviour, same old person sheltering a new mind, I stare and gape.
The mind is currently vacillating between eager curiosity, missing the older versions and plain indifference.
