Your heartbeat is talking

Hello. How do you do? Have you ever been in a place where you feel strange and daft? To truly feel a sense of belonging, you must feel a shared sense of persona with people around you. The need to belong makes us seek connection with other people. Nevertheless what’s central to the identity of every human is to belong to a place. In essence, there is love of the place we grew up, familiar sights and people, accustomed smells and sounds, and suchlike. We begin to bloom where we are planted until circumstances propel us out of our web of comfort to a far off land. First time in a foreign land, brings mixed feelings of anxiety and excitement. When home seems oceans away, homesickness would always build up. But choosing to live overseas is like creating a second home across our big blue planet that someday, no doubt one would be homesick for too. Home grows wider to include everyone who have nourished you in your travels.

Loving your country while realizing that others no less love theirs is imperative. This love manifests in the way of life. For every people in this world, their own men are valorous and their own women are beauteous. That’s incontestable. There is always a gentle prodding in me for the need to belong. Often our roots search for nourishment and stability. Belongingness is our extensive need. The need for love and nourishment is a social need. And that’s why it is hard to put down our phones. We love to see and be seen and our smartphones tap into this need. Every part of our lives is correlated to belonging to something. One way to work on racking up a sense of belonging is acceptance of others and their views even if you disagree. Being keen to stick up for what’s important can help gain ground. If you’re annoyed about a food in a restaurant or an unpleasant weather, summon up that the food or weather is not the aim. Connecting with people is far more momentous.

Sometimes, it is hard to fit yourself into a place, and set up a protocol. You can never anticipate the trajectory of life. Perhaps you don’t have to know. If you can acknowledge the roots buried deep within your heart and feel rooted no matter where, you can create belonging with and among others. You can become your own home and in your heart you can flourish and prosper. Books and writings make us conscious that other people share the same emotions that we do and we feel less alone. The American novelist Scott Fitzgerald says, “That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.” Rooted in our own sense of belonging, we all can reach towards the same sky delightfully rooted in love.

However, our stories are always unfinished. There is always a gap between how things are in your life and how they would be. Or a pivotal page from your life’s story was inequitably ripped away. Every day we finish a page and every year a chapter, yet our lives go unfinished. There is never adequate time to reach our targets or to appease our longings. The measure of time that I got to know since I was taught how to tell time on a clock seems to vanish. Indeed every so often, life seems like fragments of a story waiting to be completed into a well-thumbed paperback.

There are a million reasons why. The unfinished story starts with the struggles and challenges we face daily to meet our needs, our children’s needs, and the emotional strife that often preoccupies us. It could be the simple things. I struggle to finish reading a book or write my blog amidst other responsibilities. But I still read whenever I can, even though I don’t really fit into the normal mould of an avid reader. The grouchiness as a mother is inevitable. Our lives are always going to be a work in progress and hence the “unfinished stories”.

Have no qualms to scratch out the parts that’s out of sync with your heart when you write your story. I don’t prefer neat pages with no blots for what is a splendid story without an ink stain? Just like a child who accidentally dropped his favourite sweet in the grime, there are times when we want to say, “this isn’t fair”. But life’s unfairness is not preordained. Often there is no good reason why something happens. But I feel it’s our responsibility to create some meaning in every situation. Giving meaning to our life’s events rather than trying to figure out reasons for it is good for what ails you.

All feelings of gladness or sadness is valid. It’s important to feel, even if you feel nothing quite often. Your heart keeps whispering to you because it wants to keep you safe. Don’t shrivel away from what your heart says. Bear in mind that you aren’t following a script, you are writing it. Listen to your intuition before you add anything to your unfinished story. Your heartbeat is talking.