As the year turns, there’s a temptation to look back, tracing footpaths from the past. An intention I’ve been nurturing very recently lies in the notion that reminiscing for too long through the lens of nostalgia can unmoor oneself from the present.
Like the land, we are sprawling. Ever-changing. Sometimes we build walls around a memory, an experience, wanting nothing more than to keep it in our grasp and say, ‘this is mine’. But holding on too tightly to *before* can obscure the beauty of what’s unfolding here and now.
I’ve been spending each morning walking or riding my bike around Shantiniketan, trying to return to the places that once inspired me when I first settled here a few years ago. But most are no longer the same. Walls up. Bridges gone. A landscape partitioned by boundaries.
Rather than revisiting these places again and again and hoping to reclaim the wonder they once instilled, I realize I’ve got to move forward, explore further, shift focus from ‘what she was’ to the small, secret places she still holds. This landscape reminds me that to confine her is to limit the endless possibilities of who she is still becoming.
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