Crossroads

Ballad on poles - Melbourne during the Commonwealth Games


Hunger is trying to squeeze in through my belly-button... because I hadn't cooked in a while. I was down with a cold and mild fever... It’s ironic that my body temperature went up while I was actually suffering from a 'cold' but blowing my runny nose in to a cloth (and the surrounding furniture at times… LOL… ok ok… I’ll wipe them all as soon as I get better!!!) didn't leave much time or energy for me to ponder on the paradoxes in the terminology that was being used to describe my health condition. Feeling a bit better now at last... so should cook up something decent today...
Miss. Lecturer-at-Law-who-is-about-to-get-engaged wrote in, ending her letter with a brief one-liner about how hopeless the situation in the motherland was. I have been thinking about the state of Paradise Isle myself... ironically, it is only when you leave the place that you begin to really miss it... and I mean REALLY miss it – and not just the kottu or the mountains and lakes or the Perahera or the warm beaches…
This time, it struck me a bit harder on the skull, because I will soon have to decide how long I am going to stay here in Australia before I return home for good. (God forbid me from having to decide "whether" I want to go back at all... I have already made up my mind that I will definitely go back for good, simply because I don't see how I could possibly raise a family here... but then again, "raising a family" has a finite window of opportunity... which I might miss by a pretty big margin if things don't improve soon...) do I want to stay here for a couple of years…? Perhaps a decade?
I think, in the face of such decisions, I have been forced to consider the facts more deeply than I ever thought I could... and it is only when I think about them at a certain depth that I begin to realise what "home" actually means... honestly, factors like 'the economy', ‘political environment' and all such blabber matter much less... What really matters is that home is where the people you love live... the people who love you the same way... your support network or family and friends - the people you can rely on even if the whole world crumbles around you... the people you trust...
When all of that is missing, nothing else matters as much. It doesn't make a huge difference what the more measurable components of "the quality of life" you enjoy are. Even war and peace matters less.
To me, that does not mean I can afford to completely disregard the social environment I live in. I mean, it is only after I came here, that I realised the amount of violence that I had been exposed to - and gotten used to as a result – growing up with a civil war in Paradise. It made a HUGE difference for me, not to be exposed to stories of "so many dead on one side and so many dead on the other side" and not to see the jubilation of some people when there are more deaths on "the other side" and the mourning of deaths on their side...
hopefully, I will get to go home soon and I may get a little opportunity to experience life at home again after almost a year and a half... Honestly, I am quite nervous about the future I am stepping into - not personally but as a nation and as a global community... and of the world that the process of human “civilization” has created... But to know that there are good men and women - within my own circle of friends and way beyond, gives me reason to be a bit optimistic... because I believe - maybe it’s more a stubborn and dogmatic belief than an affirmation of facts - that we can make a difference...