Thirty six hours after our return from India I found myself in an environment that couldn't have been more different from the place where I had just spent four weeks. I found myself at the family bach in a tiny town called Raurimu, five minutes north of National Park in the central North Island; the place which I had said was my home at the pre-trip meetings. A polar opposite from India: there it is quiet, peaceful, green and spacious. During the trip, some guys had been counting down to Goa; I was counting down to the moment when I could say that I had finally returned home. The next day, I remained at the cottage, alone, while my family and family friends walked the Tongariro Crossing. I was far too tired to go with them so I slept in and spent the day thinking about my experiences over the preceding weeks as I looked over the swamp behind our house. I went for a walk up a hill to a spot where you can see the whole village and sat there for half an hour thinking.
This spot is one of my favourite places in the world to be. It sounds oddly specific, but over the past few years when we were at Raurimu I would wake up early and go up there and think about things. Raurimu was my dad's family bach and it has acted as a link between me and him during my life. There again, I looked over the town, a beautiful view to my eyes, and surprisingly felt the same as I did as I watched the sun set over the Maidan in Kolkata as we walked off the rugby field. I thought about all the things I had learnt about beauty and the line from a poem we were given in Varanasi, "I want to know if you can see beauty, even when it's not pretty every day." I thought about my family and friends who were out tramping and I thought about all the things I had learnt about the value of family and people in your life; I thought about how in the past I had tended to push them away, when I should have been inviting them in. When I was sitting there I felt tired, I felt happy (to be there) and sad (to be missing out on the walk) all at the same time. But mostly, I felt the same as I did when I was in India and that made me realise something.
One of the things I had really struggled with in India was the fact that I didn't feel different. I felt how I did normally, under normal circumstances. I had expected to feel completely different, like somehow the place would take over me and change me. In discussions since my arrival home, I found my mum had felt a similar way when she first went to Paris, expecting to somehow feel like a new person. When we were in Varanasi, Mr Skeen posed a question to our debrief group, "Who am I", and we had to try and say who we were without saying what we did, a task to try and separate us from our hobbies or jobs. I struggled for a long time with this question, and I still don't have a clear cut answer, but it did help me understand one thing about myself.
In the past I had seen myself as a generally unhappy person. I struggled in my primary school years with feeling unhappy and angry. I was introverted and kept to myself. When I went to intermediate, I told myself to change my attitude, to consciously become a happier person. One of the things discussed on the trip was the idea of masks, hiding your real self behind a mask (in other words acting differently) so that people can't know the real you. I hid myself behind a smile. I tried as hard as I could to be positive so that all the new people I met thought I was a different person. It worked for me. I made lots of new friends but when I went home I still felt like an act. After six years of this strategy, it became second nature to me. It stopped becoming a conscious decision and became my attitude. I rarely thought about it.
However, as I mentioned before, when I was in India I felt the same as what I did when I was at home, at Raurimu. India boiled me down to the essence of me and even when I was tired and anxious, hungry and scared, I still felt the same as what I did when I was at my bach with some of my best friends. That was when I realised I'm not the same person I once was. When travel, exhaustion and the sights I was seeing stripped me back to my purest self, I wasn't sad or angry or introverted. I was happy and positive (this is of course a generalisation; I felt sad and angry many times but at isolated moments). I'm no longer that person, I'm now fundamentally a happy person, and realising that feels amazing.
I guess in the end it was the reality of not feeling any different in India that taught me my biggest lesson. I know it sounds clichéd, but I suppose you could say I found myself in India and that is an experience I will never forget.
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