Belonging
‘Don’t compare your path with anybody else’s. Your path is unique to you.’
-Ram Dass
I wake up, I hear something. I am not quite sure what woke me up. I had finally fallen into a very deep sleep, tired from the emotions of the day, as the children navigate their first few days in their new school. Then I realize the bed, the cupboards, the whole house is shaking violently. The dog is at the side of the bed about to bark. It’s ok, I whisper to him; then I realize. It’s an earthquake.
I put my hands on the backs of my young son and daughter, worried the violent shaking will pull them off the bed. I look around the room quickly, is there anything obvious that can fall on our head? No, I don’t think so.
I look up at the tall built-in cupboards. The doors violently shake; they would be heavy if they fell on us. I place pillows on the children’s backs. Should I wake them and go outside? No, I better stay put now.
I hope my daughter and mother are ok in the other bedroom. I hold still and breathe, waiting for the shaking to stop. It moves back, forth, sideways, and seems to go on and on. I think to myself the first 3 days are the most crucial to survive in any natural disaster.
The shaking begins to slow down and then it stops. A jolt. Silence. Dogs barking and the sound of shutters clanging up.
The dog and I hurry out of the room to check on my daughter and mother - still asleep. All fine, nothing fallen.
We walk into the living room and peer out of the large windows. A few lights, but nothing much. The dogs have mostly stopped barking. Silence quickly returns to the dark streets of parked cars and trees.
We sit on the sofa; the dog is very alert. I feel a weird swaying - was that imagined or movement? I look at him, he looks at me, I can’t tell. Will it start up again? I feel disorientated, like I am walking on an incline.
After waiting in the living room for a while, I go back to the bedroom and lie down, the dog at my side on the rug. My favourite Persian rug was bought in Singapore. I think back to the time I bought it, just after I arrived there. Seems like a lifetime ago. My oldest daughter was just 3 then and running barefoot all over the rugs in the store. She loved this one as it was silk and so soft.
I can’t sleep. The dog looks up at me with his sad eyes, I pat him and sigh, my companion through fire and earthquake this summer. Eventually we both doze off. I don’t know how long it took, and I feel swaying on and off. I can’t be sure if it's real or imagined.
We have been in Athens for around 6 weeks when the earthquake was felt. Its epicenter is close, measured at 5.4 on the Richter scale. Not big by earthquake standards, but it’s shallow and close so we experience strong, prolonged shaking.
“I feel that the universe is testing me with sky and earth and stripping me back down to nothing with this move. I am rootless yet I feel no lightness only heaviness. ”
The island feels like a distant memory. In fact, it almost seems swallowed up and forgotten the moment we drove off the ship. Our car stuffed full, bumpy over the ramps and onto the port, the sound of the port police whistles shrill in the air. An aggressive mass of traffic surging forward, we even catch sight briefly of one of my cousins suited and booted in her crisp whites, doing her port police duties and waving frantically. Luggage, suitcases, shouts, flustered tourists on foot, motorbikes revving, all of Athens escaping to the islands, whilst we are arriving.
As we drive further from the port towards the north of Athens, under the foot of Mount Parnitha, the roads get quieter, and the air is a touch cooler.
The city begins to sleep outside of the tourist center - small shops place notices on the glass fronts saying ‘closed until the end of august’, ‘closed for summer holidays’.
After the first week of August, our Highstreet is mainly closed. A couple of coffee shops remain open, a hardware store, the odd restaurant, the mobile phone shops and the banks. Further out near the highway only the chain supermarkets and the large electronics super stores keep going.
The city is quiet, but our days are busy. Our container arrives and with that a feeling of home when we see our familiar items. Endless trips to the few open stores buying essentials we didn’t bring, waiting on deliveries, navigating pick up points, getting to know our neighborhood and of course all the usual daily household things that need to be done wherever you live in the world.
I constantly have the sense some items are missing from the container. There should be more things, I am sure of it. Of course that’s not the case. We received every single one of our boxes that were packed up.
But I can’t shake that feeling - maybe it was the ruthless declutter - I overdid it.
I wanted to feel a lightness in letting go of things and yet I don’t. Instead I feel an emptiness. I yearn for silly, unimportant things I didn’t bring. Even the children keep saying things are missing from their rooms, but I know that’s not the case.
“When we leave a place, what do we let go of and what do we gain?”
We find one local fish restaurant that remains open throughout the quiet august weeks. We go regularly and it feels like a small refuge. They begin to recognize us; the first fleeting moments of feeling familiarity.
Each day feels like a race against time to prepare the house and children’s things for school. Every night I am glad when it’s time to sleep, I want to shut the world out. I tell a friend that I think I am feeling depressed. She explains to me that heavy depressive energy is bringing me back to the the earth here. As I listen to her, I know this to be true. I have to keep going, this heaviness keeps me grounded or else, I might just float away.
As September begins, the mornings are cooler and crisp. It feels luxurious to open a window and feel the fresh air after so many years of thick tropical heat and only aircon to cool.
By the afternoon when I collect the children from school it is scorching hot again. I avoid the front area of the school which is jammed up with a steady stream of blacked out Alphard’s, range rovers, Porche SUVs, Landcruiser’s and drivers standing around, waiting to collect children. Instead, I park up in a dusty abandoned field behind the school - the kinds of fields you find all over Athens, away from the center. Who knows who owns them? Some the government, some private, some have abandoned buildings on them, rubbish strewn around. I like the short walk, and I avoid all the frustrated drivers and beeping horns at the junction.
The early school days are excruciating, watching and witnessing the children walk off into the school. They aren’t easy days at all for them. Tears, anger, bewilderment and loneliness. Children, they say, are resilient. One of my most detested phrases. It's meaningless to me, they are resilient through necessity - they don’t make the decisions. My children did not ask to come here and yet they must endure this momentous change in their lives, like I too endured much change in my children that I never requested.
I think of them all constantly throughout the day. I think of my son wandering around the playground alone. My son who always had so many friends, a never-ending flow of playdates and friends to our house and me driving them all home happy with his little sister in the back too. My oldest just beginning to experience the freedoms our old city offered her, bubble tea and sushi at the malls. Communities they belonged to. For some, fitting in means belonging, but at what sacrifice to our true self?
“I feel I belong everywhere I go, no matter where it is or who I’m with as long as I never betray myself. And the minute I become who you want me to be in order to fit in and make sure people like me is the moment I no longer belong anywhere.”
Africa Brooke talks about ‘A constant tension and push pull of wanting to fit in and wanting to stand out.’ She goes on to define home as ‘a feeling of safety, a sense of familiarity and the comfort of a community.’
Safety - not in the literal sense per se - many years ago home for me, was east London, which was an area with high street crime. But I knew all the streets, which places were better to avoid at night. It was that familiarity that produced a feeling of safety.
I feel an intense homesickness for old routines, for that feeling of familiarity. Sometimes I sit in the cool of the bedroom, silent, in fact I yearn for silence, looking at the pine trees outside the window and one lone palm tree. I feel like I am clinging onto the palm. I soak in all its frequencies, like it is holding me with its soft southeast Asian humid warm air.
“The quieter you become the more you can hear.” ― Ram Dass, Be Here Now
I walk down from our house through the green leafy streets to the Highstreet. Large, gated houses, older small apartment complexes, large houses that look almost abandoned covered in vines, some houses look alpine with lots of wood, some have more stone, occasional modern glass ones, but everywhere is green. I see the mountains circling me and feel their power and strength steady me, almost like a thud in the chest. After a decade living at sea level in a completely flat land, I find these mountains endlessly breathtaking. I don’t take them for granted. I feel a strange magnetic pull towards them; my father tells me he isn’t surprised and tells me stories of them. We walk and climb on them on Sundays. Nothing much is open here on Sundays. It feels strange, desolate and reminds me of my childhood in England.
But during the week, the main street is very busy. Cars parked over the pavements, double parked, on zebra crossings, motorbikes and delivery vans, all the traffic weaving in and out and crossing over. The street is filled with green grocers, fish mongers, butchers, bakers, dry cleaners, every kind of shop you can think of. And people are talking everywhere. I realize how digitalized my previous life had become. I don’t see many people on their phones. I find the constant talking and questions exhausting some days.
And among the chaos, the coffee shops remain full like a temple to life here. Where time stands still as people sit in peace, or argue in peace over their coffees. People here have the most extraordinary ability to relax whilst the world might be crumbling around them. Ancient bureaucratical systems, political nepotism, protests, civil unrest, huge economic crisis and previously military coups, occupation, war. A geography of thousands of islands fragmented, mountainous, deep valleys, strong winds, hot dry summers, complicated weather patterns and challenging terrain often.
An ancient civilization, its relics found everywhere. Tectonically active, sitting at a collision zone between the Eurasian and African plates, as the Eurasian plate slides under the African this leads to volcanos, the formation of huge mountains and of course earthquakes. Its unstable geology seems to reflect the culture - passionate, unpredictable at times with a huge heart and warmth, but not soft. There is a harshness that cuts through me here, always since being a tiny child I remember this feeling.
The traffic is ordered chaos, with potholes and odd junctions with no lights - I am left wondering how I navigate. I watch to see what the cars in front do. It’s a place where you must be assertive, firm and have endless patience. Hesitation gets you nowhere in this cacophony of a city.
As I stand at the school gates I am looking through a glass bubble, conversations all around, the noise seems to warble, like I am in a swimming pool, hearing the sounds through water. I stand quietly and observe. No rush, the right people will cross my path when they are meant to. I feel a strange sense of peace and sadness standing amongst the throb of chatting people.
For almost 17 years I have held the title of ‘foreigner’ or ‘Westerner’. When I first moved to Hong Kong I was bemused and if I am honest, slightly affronted by this label. Where I had just arrived from (London) it was very rude to label someone like that. We were supposed to pretend we all had equal rights. And anyway..everyone was mixed with something. The fact is, I didn’t hold the same rights and the Hong Kongers just said it directly. I liked it. They are not a nation to soften their words. I was never asked where I was from, just the ‘west’. Even the other ‘foreigners’ don’t ask you much. Most people have lived in so many places, no one knows where they are from now.
foreigner /fôr′ə-nər, fŏr′-/
noun
One who is from a foreign country or place.
One who is from outside a particular group or community; an outsider.
A person belonging to or owning allegiance to a foreign country; one not native in the country or jurisdiction under consideration, or not naturalized there; an alien; a stranger.
Similar: alien stranger
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition •
Foreigner: one not native to a place, or community
Merriam webster dictionary
Arriving here, I sit at the precipice of ambiguity. Depending on where I am and the people around me, I get classified in all manners.
“I don’t receive the same grand welcome as a fully-fledged foreigner, but I am also not a local. Often I am viewed with suspicion.. how much do I know? Do I know the secrets of the place? How much can I understand?”
Sometimes my Greekness is acknowledged, other times I am placed firmly in the foreigner box, but not quite as foreign as before. Sometimes people announce loudly I don’t look Greek, or other times that I do. When I am asked for my full name, I see the beat skipped as I reply with a full local name. I feel a thud of shame rise up, I shouldn’t be allowed my own name. I am not Greek enough to hold this name. This is an uncomfortable place to exist in. Wavering in and out of spaces, no clear demarcation. Other people’s labels should not matter, and yet the constant labeling does and it exhausts me.
And then the words of Ram Dass float into my head, ‘Be here now.’ It's like a soft balm. It was one of my favourite books in my twenties, lately his words rise up in me often.
I rarely ask anyone where they are from. I may ask, where does home feel like? Or is this home now? Or where did you live before living here? Or where did you grow up as a child? Which countries have you lived in? But no, never, where are you from.
“To him who has had the experience no explanation is necessary, to him who has not, none is possible.”― Ram Dass, Be Here Now
I see the endless posts on expat groups about people searching for the next place to live and asking for recommendations, everyone searching, yearning, looking…
In one way, we are all looking for the same basic things, but on the other hand human nature is subjective. Our values, our priorities, our lifestyles, which means these are unanswerable questions. What might be the perfect weather to one, might be awful to another. I see those wanting to return home but can’t and those who had to return to their home country, yet didn’t want to and are struggling. Those that feel rooted to their land no matter where they are in the world and those that never felt comfortable in their cultural identity. And of course, many that leave their origin culture to find themselves, needing that perspective and distance to reconnect with the lands of their ancestors.
“If you observe well, your own heart will answer.” (de Lubicz) quoted in Be Here Now, Ram Dass.
And then the endless question on loop asked; How long does it take to feel ‘home’, how long will it take my children to settle in, feel ‘home’ or ‘belong’?
It’s on repeat in the expat groups. And then I can only think of the famous Maya Angelou words..
‘You only are free when you realize you belong no place - you belong every place - no place at all. The price is high. The reward is great.’