It has been a couple of years since I last had a holiday in which I did not travel, in which I felt "at home", where my soul could rest. From my brother moving to the UK, and our family spending time there over Christmas, to him visiting us but our whole family travelling a 1000 km to another city to spend Christmas there, to my own life-changing and getting a girlfriend who lives a 1000 km away from me. Christmas for me, in the last 7 or so years has been one of travelling. Always travelling. Never being "at home".
My soul is always on the move, never at rest, and this leaves me in this strange uncanny position in which I am not always looking forward to this time of year. I am already beginning to pack to travel back home, and then I need to travel back to where I am now. Again, movement, always moving.
Christmas is a time of moving. And isn't this also what gifts are? We have come to adopt the tradition of giving gifts, it symbolises something. This "something" has been copied over and over again, with different families having different traditions, and different cultures having their own reasons for gift-giving. But with all this copying and pasting, we have lost the original meaning of gift giving, if there even was an original meaning behind this act. But the act of giving a gift symbolises moving, movement.
It is funny how something like a holiday which usually symbolises vacation, a time of rest, becomes even more stressful and busy than the usual day-to-day. Some people flourish in this period, loving the idea of gift-giving, cooking copious amounts of food, friends and family getting together. And I love these aspects as well.
It is just this strange nagging feeling that always gets me down this time of year, this uncanny feeling of not being at home, even though I am at home. So much have happened over the years, with my grandparents moving on (to a better place), to my brother physically moving out of the country, and my own moving in between two homes, my own and my girlfriend's. Even though I have so many "homes", not one inspires a feeling of "being-at-home" in me. Not because of some profound reason beyond the one that all of these homes signify "movement" to me. When I arrive at the one, I am already planning the next one. If my brother visits, we are already planning another vacation away from "home".
I am playing a bit with words now. Christmas and home are both concepts and ideas which are "stagnant", in place. Our modern idea of a home is not linked to the nomadic one. Home is a property we buy, a building with a foundation, something "in place". Christmas on our modern calender is always fixed, the 24th of December is in our culture "oukersdag" or the day before Christmas, and the 25th of December is Christmas. These dates cannot really moved around. It can, but it also cannot. It is eternalised (in a very limited sense) in our minds.
So, these things cannot really move, but I move within them, I move within my home, and within the day of Christmas. I move from one home to another, I jump from one physical place to another, and this mostly happens over the festive season. Christmas entails movement, my living situation entails movement. My soul cannot find rest.
The act of giving a gift symbolises movement. I buy something which I intend to give away, to displace it, from being my possession to being someone else's. The intention is movement, possession changes hands. I give away what I just acquired. The one moment it is here, home, the next, it is gone, at another home. This is a very trivial statement to make, but it is basically how my movement from one home to another feels like. However, the present gets only moved once or twice. My movement is perpetual. Always going from one home to another.
But this moving around is, in some sense, essential to life. We can imagine a life in which no movement is required. But this will cease to be life. I am currently watching a series in which the premise is that when the world ends, some people will want to do crazy things they never had time for in their busy lives. But then there is the other portion of people who will not want to do this, they will only carry on living their lives as they used to. Going to work, and so on. The series, in my opinion, misses the group that will do nothing. There is no need to run around doing everything you wanted to, neither is there the need to carry on with daily and habitual tasks. There is only the need to do nothing. To drink a beer, with a clear conscience, knowing that this act of doing nothing will not have any significant meaning.
I wish for a Christmas in which this perpetual movement for a moment just comes to a standstill, in which my soul can breathe, even only for a moment.
But in saying this, I also appreciate this movement, as it reminds me of being alive. And in moving/being alive, I have accomplished many things which the younger version of myself would never have guessed I would do.
And on that note, I hope everyone has a wonderful festive season. May your soul take a breather.
All of the writings are my own. The photographs are also my own, taken with my iPhone.
A simple answer for you. Get hitched, put your roots down and grow in life until you are a strong as tree. Trees breathe so much better than humans and they always give back.
!BEER
That is the plan! I want to get my roots growing there in the Cape, she just needs to finish her studies. She is going to see someone at Stellenbosh University for a program she really wants to do in copy editing and translation studies. So, I am really rooting for her to get into that program.
Marian has recently completed a copy editing course, and it's the way to go.
Let's hope that she gets it.
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