The storm was raging outside the sparse wooden hut, perched high on the edge of a dramatic ledge somewhere in the Julian Alps. Only a few days ago, the mountain scene was painted against a piercingly blue sky with strokes of warm sunshine. Now thunder reverberated between the granite peaks all around me. I listened to the raindrops smashing the windows like marbles falling down concrete stairs, constant, meditative. Grateful for the safety of these refuges after some hairy moments on the trail, I sat curled up on the stiff wooden bench under the large central stove, trying to absorb its warmth into my bones. I’d been here for two days now, with no sign of the weather abating. Apparently, this was unseasonable, but this had been the story of my trail a few times now and I learnt not to expect or predict anything in these unforgiving beautiful mountain ranges. With no internet unless I forked out a small fortune, and no phone signal, I relished this rare moment of disconnection from the outside world that we are no longer given the fortune to experience. Two days with little else to distract me other than my notebook, and my kindle, eating, drinking and sleeping.
We so rarely give ourselves this gift of time in today’s frenetic and chaotic world, this opportunity to sit and write, or read, uninterrupted, unpunctuated. I know I could find more willpower, more self-discipline, more focus. But, according to Johan Hari in his eye-opening book Stolen Focus, that is what big tech wants you to think. They want you to blame yourself and make it a ‘you’ problem, instead of a societal problem, or a government problem, and undoubtedly not a corporation problem. Instead, it is a ‘you’ problem, an individual lack-of-self-control problem, that needs to seek out solutions, often sold to you, shiny, branded, wrapped up in a neat productivity package, an elegant self-help manual, or another course that promises to change your life.
The addictive power of smartphone technology and how it disrupts and erodes our ability to concentrate for more than a few minutes at a time, is fascinatingly terrifying to both witness and to personally experience. As an (amateur) neuroscientist - my first degree was in neuroscience - I am intrigued and disconcerted by what may be collectively happening to our synaptic connections, our ever-diminishing states of focus and flow. Anyway, I digress. Suffice to say, sometimes the only option for me is to well and truly not have access to my phone, internet, computer, or the outside world. Unless the world is outside, in the mountains, figuratively speaking.
And so as I sat savouring the energy of the storm angrily doing its thing, cocooned in the relative safety of the alpine hut, my head, and my heart, I started to ponder one of my own life’s big mysteries - home. It’s a question that seems to roll off the tongue so easily when you meet someone new, and yet, throughout my life, it has set off a small visceral reaction of dread in me if I was asked it in conversation by someone who didn’t know me. Someone who didn’t know my story.
“Where’s home for you?”
I briefly flinch, and then intuitively make a split-second decision as to whether I embark on the long rambling un-answer that has puzzled me on a subliminal level for much of my life. Or whether it isn’t worth the time - surface-level pleasantries that probably won’t lead to connection anyway, and so let’s save us both the awkwardness of a somewhat convoluted story. That’s what I mostly did in my previous life. London would be the somewhat lacklustre answer I’d give, mainly because it’s the city I have lived in on and off for the most number of years. Thirteen out of thirty-six to be precise. And in several broken stints because I couldn’t hack it for too long anyway, feeling awkwardly out of place amongst the well-polished steel and concrete, the ambitiously hungry and well dressed crowd. Every time I answered London, a small part of the real truth within me withered, even though London has been home at times.
In actual fact, I didn’t know myself at all, and I definitely didn’t have an answer to where home was in the traditional, straightforward sense. Not knowing oneself is quite a prevalent angst for any thirty-something these days, so I’m not unique in this I’m aware! Life is all about figuring out who you are in a way, a game of trial and error, of experiences and relationships and careers. Every day can become a sliding doors moment into a new life, a new direction, a new person. But it becomes simpler and certainly more peaceful when you move through the levels of the game towards that final objective of ‘figuring out who you truly are’ in all its pop psychology-laden cheese. Pico Iyer, the novelist, said something about home that has always resonated with me - eloquently managing to convey what I couldn’t, but what I have felt to be true over the years that I have been thinking more and more about this notion. “Home is, in the end, not just the place where you sleep, but the place where you stand. For more and more of us, home has really less to do with a piece of soil than, you could say, with a piece of soul.”
I was born in the East End of London in the late eighties which apparently makes me a legitimate Cockney, although my most current accent, for there have been a few, would let me down in the company of the born and breds. I was the first child born to my English mother and my Slovene father. Mum has subsequently learnt that she’s far more Irish than English, with a bit of Scottish, Welsh and Scandinavian thrown in there too, and my father was a blend of mostly Slovene, with a bit of German, Danish, Baltic and Balkan thrown in too according to ancestryDNA.
I moved to the other side of the world at the tender age of just a few weeks old, and spent my juvenescence in Nepal. We moved around a lot growing up, uprooting our lives and our homes once every four or five years on average. New schools, new friends, new pets. My mother would tell me that sadly Willow, my first pet, the loyal mongrel I dearly loved, could not get a visa for Pakistan. She would have to stay to be looked after by the next family who would be moving into our “home” where I had spent the first five years of my fragile existence. Willow became Scrap, Scrap became Chuku, who then became Maxi. I learnt not to become too attached, or the pain of saying goodbye would seep in and risk sensitising me too much. I wore this protective armour of disconnection for much of my teens after my dad left, into my early thirties. Until it didn’t really protect me anymore, but cocooned me from myself and the world, from real connection.
Home to me was where my mum was, and where Didi - my other mother - was. The two constants in my early, confused mind. At age thirteen, during those hormonally charged years of angst and anger, that constant was no longer. The anchor was pulled up once again from the newly settled seabed of our home in Zimbabwe, in my mother’s well-meaning desire for a bit more stability and consistency. My barely three-foot-tall little brother Andrej, and I made the long journey from Harare to London - unaccompanied minors we were called. It was an adventure and a baptism of fire all at once. We turned up at the gates of a boarding school somewhere in the leafy and pleasant Garden of England, in a country I had never lived in, but I was born in, and seemed to have a passport from. I had a strange and foreign Southern African accent compared to the people around me. I wore very different clothes to the other girls who mostly came from the surrounding village prep schools and seemed to all know one another. And so the question of home, of identity, of belonging, became ever harder to answer.
To be continued.
Yes Em! Really enjoyed reading this. Looking forward to the next instalment.