Tomorrow will be the last morning at our summer house. Making the move here on the 1st July was hard. I’ve got to make new arrangements, pack my stuff and start getting used (again) to a different routine. It’s a move our family undertakes every summer. To be honest, when July approaches I know that soon I have to adapt to our summer house with all the good and bad things it brings into my life.
I think that part of me still resists change. Especially when it means sleeping in a room that you know can never be your own. If you live in a place that is only a temporary shelter and, thus, you cannot get yourself to call it a “home”. Then comes the trouble with getting accustomed to a lifestyle that you thought was part of the past. It can be difficult, yes, to push yourself to change and adapt knowing that In a few months you’ll have to unlearn everything and return to your old life.
I suspect that we overlook how much our homes can affect who we are. Of course, it’s not just about the material environment but also about the emotional significance we attach to our homes. For, in reality, much of what makes a home a home and a house a house isn’t the furniture or structure of our residences but the memories that we associate with things and places. In this sense, we endow our homes or houses with qualities that do not exist outside our minds.
As I prepare for my last night in this house, I realise that it’s not only my reluctance to change that was the problem. After all, during my short lifetime, I have had to make changes and adapt to new environments and accept the fact that I may have to be admitted for a number of days at the hospital. In a way, I got to live like a nomad - travelling to our summer house when the weather gets hot and packing for hospital when my body goes on a health strike. Indeed, my reluctance to move was rooted in the days I spent as a child at this house where I had to spend the summer without television or my comforts at home.
In retrospect, it was perhaps in this very house where my oldest brother David died, that I started reflecting on life and own mortality. It was here that I tasted what it’s like to play on the streets with other children around my neighbourhood. It was also here the conservative Catholic priests preaching about sin and how impairment was the product of sin - of human’s disobedience. There was the source of my pain that appeared to erase all the good memories as I wondered whether I had a physical impairment out of divine punishment. It was then that I started to doubt and really ask myself who I was. Put in that light, my childhood negative experiences have helped me to be who I am today.
Yes, this is an ending to a stay that I believed I didn’t want but which now appears I much needed. Tomorrow I should be back at my old home. But I learned a lot after reflecting on my experiences at this summer house. I believed that when it this day would come. I would be free. Yet, there’s a lingering sadness that there is an ending here. On the other hand, I am also reminded of the fact that my life and that of others is very much like a nomadic journey. While I knew when my particular journey will end and start, I still had to prepare for the next trip. The only difference is that life can end at any minute and while it’s good to make plans for the future, we can’t live for the future.
Besides, an ending also marks a new beginning. The beginning of a new life which is in itself always ending and beginning all the time. Perhaps it’s also a good opportunity to start calling my “summer house”, my “summer home”. It’s a change of words, I know, and the building hasn’t changed structurally. But, in some respect, it has changed on a radical level.
In my mind!
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