When does a house become home?
Recently I was moving to my new home and I underwent series of emotional and spiritual awakening with this move.
When you move into a house, it is just four walls, floor and ceiling with some basic amenities. But you set it up with all the necessary furniture, comforts and things that make the place livable. Daily you undertake tasks to keep that place cozy, comfortable and clean. As long as you live there, you call it home, create memories of togetherness, love and safety. This home becomes part of your life, your comfort, safety and joy. If anything is missing, changes its place, you take note and make the required changes till you feel comfortable in that arrangements. You fall in love with everything in it, you love the space inside and out, you love the neighborhood, shops, roads, gardens. You get to know people, you create your identity and life around it. It almost becomes inseparable from you.
But when time comes to leave a place, if you are on rent and you have to move or got a transfer and got to move, reasons can be many, but reactions and pain all of us undergo is the same.
Month before the shifting, you start taking note of the house and every thing in it. You start feeling the loss and be grateful for the comfort and safety it provided. While you know there are things that you will be able to move with you and those you cannot. You start loving those you cannot move much. You feel that those lifeless things too could feel the pain you are feeling and if they were to express, they would hug you and say they will miss you and they enjoyed your company or the other way round. Over the years you have developed attachment to the toilet seat, the sink, the mirror, the towel rod, cupboards everything that provided you comfort and you want to bow and say Thank you to each of those items. In this life again, you are not going to come back and meet them again. You feel emotionally heavy. Yet you have no other choice but to feel the gratitude and express it.
The neighborhood, the shops, the roads, the gardens, trees all of those that made you feel a part of them, rather you felt a part of them. In few days they will not be the most frequented. You are going to keep a distance though not intentionally. It is not practical to visit your old neighborhood daily. Sometimes you may come back and feel still a part of it and familiar with them, yet you know you no more belong there.
As women who get married and move homes it may be so familiar experience for us. We all undergo this. We know it is the only reality, parting has to be there to move somewhere better. We can't get attached to things and homes because ultimately we have to move, even out of this world into a new and unknown place. But till the time we are here, we got to love what we have.
Once you shift all your belongings out of that four walls which you called home, it no more holds the key to you happiness. It is just four walls and has no special appeal. You have the gratefulness that it sheltered and protected you all these years, but you cannot relate to it anymore in the same way you did when your belongings were in it. It is no more attractive, no more usable. It is just a memory of those beautiful times you had and gratefulness and nothing more.
Now, I can relate this to human body as well. Till the life is there, breath is there it is like that home with all your belongings and the day you stop breathing, it is the same feeling as the home being left with four walls. What remains is the beautiful memory and gratefulness. Maybe someone else can occupy the house that you left behind and set it up as their home and create beautiful memories for them...till they too move on!
