Coming Home

It’s amazing how easy it is to sink back into the habits of home. The life I left behind for this trip had only really held its shape for four months - the place I lived, the people I saw most often in Toronto, the way I shaped my days, the spots I frequented - it was all still fairly fresh. Yet everything feels so familiar, as though I had been away for a weekend rather then five weeks. I wonder if I picked up the same backpack and went back to Central America with Jamie two months from now, it too would feel like a type of coming home. Maybe home is not a place, but a feeling of returning to something known. Scents and sounds embedded in one of the many layers of your being pull you back to their places of origin, remind you that flakes of this place became a part of your very fabric, and so now you are a part of this place too.

I ponder this as I stand on the front porch of my parent’s house in suburban Toronto, the heat slowly seeping out of my bare feet and into the concrete porch below me. It is hailing. Tiny specks of ice are falling to the ground in thin, diagonal lines. I watch the bush in front of me shake gently under the barrage of teensy pellets, so small they dissolve into water on impact. This bush looks like a balding grandfather with its swaths of empty branches, not yet greened by spring. My parent’s neighbor pulls into his driveway across the street, garage already opening. His car disappears into the garage as the door starts to close. He will enter his house through a connecting door. Driving from one parking garage to another, he will not have to stand outside under the hail for one second in his commute home. Maybe that is why I have never met him.

I feel empty and isolated but it touches me to see the tiny specks of hail battering the streets in front of me. I am in solidarity with this hail. I want to pelt myself upon this place in a million harmless, irritating pieces. This place needs to be irritated. I know because this place and I go way back, so far back that we have the same habits, we share the same problems. This place has too many walls. It is afraid to be angry. It is afraid of a lot of things. You can make a good life here but it is not as easy to do as most of us were told it would be.

I wonder where the heat disappearing out of my feet is going. I retreat inside to sit in front of my parent’s big front windows as the sun sets. Four days ago I watched the sun set over a lake in Nicaragua. We watched the burning orange globe disappear behind the horizon, pinks and purples lingering in the sky, the water and the pebbled shore glowing with gentle, fading light until the stars emerged as little white pinpricks in a pitch black sky. I cannot help but compare this memory to the gradual, unimpressive disappearance of light that I witnessed tonight, the descending sun invisible behind rows and rows of wide, insulated homes. The light from the city leaves the night sky a shade of dull gray, giving me the strange feeling that its illumination is blocking out the night. I often feel that, here. That what is supposed to illuminate only obscures.

I am working on feeling my anger. Avoiding conflict is a trait I inherited from my father’s side of the family. My biggest problem is not a fear of other people’s frustration. My biggest problem is that I am afraid of being angry. I will twist my body into every contorted position I can think to avoid feeling any currents of rage. I’m just sad, I have misunderstood, I’m tired, ridiculous, I need to have more compassion, I need to be less sensitive. Then I will frame and re-frame and re-re-re-re-re-frame the world until I am looking at it from an angle that does not provoke any more of this feckless irritation. Because it is a great life I lead, after all. I live in a peaceful country, padded by material wealth, where I am surrounded by friends and family and boundless opportunity. How could I be anything but pleased and grateful?

Four days ago I was walking down the dirt road in Ometepe, Nicaragua, that ran between our homestay residence and the community center. To our right were breezy houses of cement walls and metal roofing, to our left was the large Lake Nicaragua that the island of Ometepe sits within. My browned feet sank into the sandy dirt with each step. We started as a line of cows ran past us in single file, being herded to graze. The mid-morning sun beat down on our shoulders, dry shrubs brushed our ankles. The smell of dust and flowers floated on the air, and the only noise came from the lapping water and unknown overlapping bird calls. There is something so delicious about being in a place that feels unknown, like a package just arrived in the mail. Shake it, feel it, what might be inside? In a new place you know yourself in new ways. Your own thoughts and reactions often come as a surprise, like a metal that changes colour when you move it from one substance to another. There is a potential for new chemical reactions.

At the community center we stretched out in a few of the many wide, colourful hammocks, trademarks of Nicaragua. I got out a pen. “Sometimes I wonder,” I wrote in my notebook, “Why I cannot feel this way at home. For you can never fully know a place, and the place I come from is certainly filled with nooks and crannies and entire realms that are yet unknown to me. The unpleasant conclusion I have reached is that there are things I do not want to know about my home. My clear gaze abroad is clouded by fear, guilt, idealization and expectation when I return to the place that birthed and grew me. Similar to the way we are startled or reluctant to admit the fallibility of our parents, so I find myself turning in unconscious circles around the pitfalls of my home. The desire to believe I really did grow up in an ideal place is strong. To believe that I got a top-notch education, that I was equipped with all the tools I need to live a happy and responsible life, that I was enmeshed in a constant fabric of love and resilience, and that all around me was beautiful and fair and right. This is the image I had of my childhood as I lived it and it is much easier to overlook the things I have learned since then to uproot this ancient, deep-sitting perspective. Changing it involves reframing the very roots of who I am, and even now that I have started trying to do it, I still find myself mired in confusion on a daily basis.

I wish to come to know, deep down, that my childhood was all the things I ever thought it was, but also their opposites, all at the same time. I do come from a beautiful place, but also a place of somewhat selective ignorance. I come from a place of anxious and depressed people, of inequalities and absurd systematic maltreatments, of luxuries permitted by callous exploitation and violence, of inherited traumas of war and poverty, of consumerism and fear, of an idolization of the material that confuses many attempts to love well. My little, beautiful, screwed up home is nestled in a city and a country and a world full of more ecstasy and pain then these streets could ever wrap themselves around, full of humans and systems and natural phenomenon that none of us will ever be able to control.

My home and its beautifully ridiculous mowed lawns, their neatness gently enforced by our local bylaw committee, looks so clean and eternal. Its big houses and air conditioned grocery stores and sturdy cars are so safe and reliable, full of kids being driven to soccer classes and parents driving to work and grandparents being ushered to doctor’s appointments, and perhaps the occasional lonely mother driving to a food bank hidden discreetly in a community center. I wish in place of one of the new monster house or cubic elementary schools we would turn the occasional lot into a colourful and well-used cemetery, like the ones here in Nicaragua. Graves outdoors, regularly repainted bright pastel colours in memory of the diseased, flowers and trees planted with unorderly love in front of tombstones. I wish that on our six-lane main roadways we would run into the occasional traffic jam caused by a cow or a moose standing obstinately in the middle of the street, unconcerned about when any of the honking cars have to be at work. I wish our groomed lawns were all filled with corn and tomatoes and zuchinni to be watered and weeded each day, to be sold at market and preserved for the winter and shared with neighbours.

Because in the place I come from, people die. Nature that we cannot control disrupts our lives. People get hungry, they get lonely, and they get white from lack of sun. You just have to look hard, I want to urge visiting friends, you have to look hard understand this place. The heartbeat of my home is not obvious. You have to press your ear softly to keyholes and peek through window panes. For behind those insulated walls, people fall in and out of love. Families endure tragedies of addiction and abuse. Children have wondrous epiphanies. People whose bodies would never appear on TV have dirty sex on beds and floors. Couples go on post-retirement adventures. The elderly ache with loneliness and disease. Business officiates make dirty deals. Political parties plot their next moves. Artists and entrepreneurs stay up all night in bouts of inspiration. Every type of aroma drifts out of stove pots, where I come from.”

We spent three days of our trip getting our scuba certification. In scuba diving you learn that you always start a dive swimming directly against the current. It does not matter if that is where you want to end up. As one dive article puts it, “This is done for two reasons. First, swimming into the current can be tiring, so divers are told to spend the first part of the dive, when they are fresh, swimming against it. Second, a diver who begins the dive swimming with the current will cover a lot of seascape in less time than he thinks. When he reverses course to return to the exit location, he will find the going much slower because he now is battling the current.”

If I can breathe easy underwater, then I can find a way to breathe easy in Toronto. Maybe I do not know where I want to end up, but my first step can be clear. Start swimming directly against the current, and see how it feels. I will never be proud of my home if I can’t look on it with the same clear gaze I use when I travel. I cannot really love this place if I do not also learn how to be furious with it. And I am finally starting to accept that I am furious. It makes me so incredibly angry that I had to discover the realities of racism, sexism and other lasting inequalities in my early twenties, because I had grown up being told that those problems did not exist anymore. I am so frustrated by the fact that I still do not feel like I fully understand how our government works, and that in our democratic society that is not seen as vital information even for university students to graduate knowing. I am so upset by Canada’s reputation in Guatemala as the main source of exploitative and environmentally damaging mining operations, and the fact that I was so unaware of that until I visited. I am so exasperated by the avoidant guilt and charity with which social inequalities and injustices are treated. I am so infuriated by the dehumanizing and unproductive power imbalances that exist in many aspects of our social services and criminal justice system. I am so affronted by the justifications for inequality, exploitation and rabid consumerism offered by the version of capitalism and other ideologies upon which our society is based.

Maybe this anger is my life belt, telling me exactly what to swim against. The anxiety and confusion that has wracked me over the past year is doubtlessly connected to my desire to ignore the raging emotion I feel in reaction to these realities, to keep my ‘rational’ thinking cap on, to retain perspective, to suppress emotions that did not seem ‘useful’. I have been so afraid that my return to Toronto will also be a return to the anxiety, immobilization and confusion I felt before leaving. Maybe in the sea of possibilities that stretch out in front of me, some good-old-fashioned, red-faced, pop-eyed tunnel vision would do me some good. Maybe I need to think less and listen to my body more, to trust my instinct and if my instinct is wrong sometimes then to just be wrong, and to be less afraid to be wrong.

I need to stand barefoot on the patio of my cultural home and let the cold pavement absorb some of the heat out of my feet. I need to cool off, and this place needs to heat up. There is some irony to thinking so much about the need to think less, but it is a goofy step in a good direction. I can feel it. I trust the feeling.

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