We Get to Where We Already Are

Each week, a story prompting you to reflect on your choices, habits, and contexts. If you can relate, it may also inspire you.

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Once upon a time, there was a young woman who left her country behind and used a plane ticket to tell the border police after entering a foreign land, “I’m not going back, let me stay here!”

They questioned her about her anger or fear for her life to see if she had any right to stay in their country. She was confined to a bed in a room in a community shelter until they made a decision.

A year, maybe? Two? Who knew.

The house had screeching voices and spoke many tongues. It was haunted by smells of people squatting in their rooms around a boiling pot on an electric cooker. It was fitted with wiggling furniture fetched from the streets and a dripping shower hanging by a limp, shrivelling hose.

She went to spend her days out in the open. It was a town made of stone, sun-bleached in summer, soaked grey in winter. The ruthless walls spoke of a century-old stern tradition that the locals were proud of: a grimy cathedral, a neat grid of perpendicular streets, uniform terraced houses, stone statues of some saint holding a book and cautioning the posterity with his raised index finger.

She roamed the town in varying circles, up the main avenue, down across the bridge into the bleak old town. When she had completed all possible circles, but it was not yet time to return to the shelter, she would sit by a fountain near the river. Its centrepiece was the sculpture of a weeping willow. She would squat under a jutting slab to hide from the sunheat in summer or the sleet in winter.

Sometimes, when her legs could take her no further, she would get on a bus and go from one end of the line to the other. It struck her at such times that it was a town made of rectangles: the bigger ones were the houses, the smaller ones, darker for their emptiness, were the windows.

When it got late, or her mind refused the sight of yet more stone boxes, she would crawl back to her room.

How much longer before she was crushed by the stone? Who knew.

The young woman caught another plane, which took her far away. She found wide open spaces, a home of her own, and a passport allowing her to cross any border.

She took the gift of her freedom: she settled for a while in a country of mountains, then moved to a country of beaches; later still, to one of rivers and green meadows. Her hair was now grey, and her children grown up, in homes they had found for themselves.

Her house stood perched up on a hill, overlooking the town. In the sunset, she often sat with a glass of wine, resting her eyes on the green hills. How she loved the place: the town sprawling gently in the distance, the vines and orchards surrounding it, the soft meanders of the river.

When her work downtown was finished for the day, she would often sit in a café, watching the people, locals and tourists, walk by. The historic architecture and the quaint little houses, the gracefully arched bridges, and the bustling main street filled with local shops – she loved the mix of composure and liveliness.

One day, strolling down the busy old-town streets, past the tiny squares, close to the river, she bent to tie her loose shoestrings. She straightened herself and halted, blinking with the sunlight.

Above her head, the branches of a weeping willow made of stone. The very fountain in the town whose name she’d long forgotten.

Her heart stood still.

How could that be?

Who knew.

It’s often not about where we’re getting, but where we’re coming from. Not what we encounter but what we bring along to that encounter in our backpack.

The geography before our eyes is so often the geography of our minds. Our home, the foreign lands, where we thrive, or wither.

Twisting it to a different perspective still: we come back, cyclically, to similar coordinates, but on a different dimension, within a different scenario.

How much of what we celebrate, or weep about, is but the mirror of our own story?

What if we return to it one day, only to find we could have wept, or celebrated instead?

Aren’t we possibly weeping about the very thing we once celebrated?