Living at home, living in Canada, thinking about India

So if you check dates and for some reason are still checking my blog, you'll see that I've been home close to a month. But I feel like leaving my last blog entry at Sangam was not quite the full circle. So here's one more to put everything so far perhaps, into perspective.

So, coming home wasn't all that shocking. I guess I've done it enough times, from all sorts of places, developing countries included that you know how things are. But as time goes by you realize a few things....

First of all I've realized that although perhaps things seem the same as when you left, and in many ways, you go back to the same life you had before (which I'm quite enjoying btw..all that family and friends and clean air!)...there is something that has changed, on the periphery perhaps.

For me, its the sum of all the little bits of knowledge and experience I've been aquiring. I don't think its something that I can quite describe in words yet, but it comes across as emotion when I see/hear things here. Crazy things, like finding myself bursting into tears over the news, or feeling intensely sorry for the really drunk man stumbling down the bikepath asking "which way to uptown?" Or feeling stifled and alone and out of sorts when in a mall and I'm staring at an aspect of the things that Canadians value....and don't say that it isn't true.

Perhaps you can attribute to Lariam, which I'm glad to say I'm finally off, or genetics..but I think its something more than that. I think its a new level of awareness...a sum of all the parts. Its from being there, and from getting feelings of what its like for different people in so many different situations. And from realizing all the complications and layers to many of the situations whether personal or global or somewhere in between. I'm not going to wish it away in any way because hopefully it will help direct me to wherever I'm going next in life. And besides, without some change, I'd just be back where I started...

So, signing off from my India adventures and looking forward to the next ones, perhaps a little closer to home.