Hugo Stewart

Three Words

A month on and I still feel like when I sit down I can get about as much order to my thoughts as an Indian train station. However in this chaos, India has redefined three words for me - not only while I was there, but also upon my return.

 

Belonging

 

This concept first arose when Mother Teresa spoke of holding the dying person’s hand to make those at the end of their lives feel valued. From then on through India, it was clear to me how important it is for people to feel valued and part of something. On a more personal level, I wouldn’t have been able to cope with the emotional toll of the hardest days of the trip without the knowledge that I had a hotel and familiar faces to return to that night. We were a group outside our comfort zones and that united us: it bound us together against the onslaught. The feeling of having somewhere to go, somewhere to escape to, helps us appreciate the value of others and unites us in our own society. Family. Friends. Involvement. I also think this was one of the hardest issues in India for me to come to terms with - so many have no one and nowhere to go.

 

Tolerance

 

India is country of extraordinary tolerance. Whether it is the 5am call to prayer or the constant symphony of horns and toots - the average man just accepts all of this and moves on with life. This attitude towards almost anything that India can throw at them is how they survive. It is part of them. And yet travelling back from a place where trains regularly run ten hours late to where the bus being a tad late causes frustration seems strange to me.  In New Zealand we have become used to not tolerating minor inconveniences. While not having to tolerate a lot of life's struggle is great, I also believe that in this comfortable existence we have slightly lost sight of how lucky we are to live in a country like ours. Tolerance is a path to good feeling and acceptance, and I think it is spread far too thin; not just in New Zealand, but in me.

 

Listening

 

Each night as we sat down to debrief, it was less about speaking and more about being heard. To know that someone has an open ear for what we were thinking meant a lot more and as the trip progressed it helped me handle the overload. Coming back to New Zealand, it was hard to adjust to the fact that maybe not everyone cares about what you have to say. I often felt for the first week or so that my story of my summer was so much more important than the stories of others. Yet by trying so hard to be heard, I was doing exactly what was frustrating me: shutting myself off from their stories and not caring for what they had to say. It was too easy to lose sight of the fact that I was not listening to others because I so desperately wanted to be heard.

Losing sight of reality in a world where the line between need and want has been blurred, in a world where so much is easy, travelling to India presents an opportunity to value things we often ignore or overlook, a chance to show us how meaningless some of the things we value are. Thank you, India.