Swedish winter means I prefer to take off somewhere else for a while. This year is no different, especially after last years long and cold winter. It is still pretty mild for being winter, but you can’t escape the darkness.
Warm and sunny weather does good, so I took the chance to leave for India for three weeks.
Right now, I find myself in Thiruvannamalai located in south east India. One of the most peaceful places I know of, despite it being right in the middle of chaotic India.
When I am here, everything you need is within walking distance and it makes me wonder how crazy we all are back home, where we spend hours every week, someday every day, going back and forth to work, to the store. We live in one place, work in another and do all our shopping in a third place. If we are lucky, schools, daycare and such things are located close to our home so that we don’t have to take the car there.
Sure, it might be like that in the big cities here too, but in smaller cities and on the countryside things are different. Here you work, eat, shop and socialize in the same area. Most people can’t afford a car and even if they did, it is easier to do everything in one place.
I would like that at home too. Walking distance to everything, and if you want to go further away, you can do so when you feel like, not when you have to. How much easier wouldn’t life be then?
India will always have a special place in my heart. I thought I would hate it. The dirt, the noise. All the people. But it turned out to be the opposite. It showed me that something else is not only possible, but already a reality in a different part of the world. And in this chaos I find myself relax and challenged. To see something deeper, to find a new way of looking at things. That is why I keep coming back.
