It's been exactly a month since I left Pakistan (and consequently, since I last wrote.)

Now, after being home for some time, I feel myself returning to comfort and routine. I find my quondam habits and mannerisms have reappeared in the interactions I share with other people. 

And when all became "normal," returning to familiarity really disquieted me. It was cloyingly comfortable.

In Pakistan I had to rely on facets of myself that were previously unemployed.  Because I had to reach deep into myself just to get by, I was living rawly. Thus, I lost dependency on all material/social frills.

This made each encounter with pain or pleasure, lucid and arresting.

I feel that here, I live a little weaker. It isn't a result of the luxury or ease that the American lifestyle provides me, but rather, I think it results from having become fully acquainted with where and who and what I am. We are always classifying ourselves into groups and characteristics and limitations based on our own life. But I think that this is self-indulgent.

Here, I am very dependent on my physical body--on my external self. To interact with others, to carry me throughout the day (Am I eating healthily? Have I gotten proper sleep? Am I alert and ready to go through this crazy schedule? Am I acting in a way that is advantageous to whatever outcome that I desire?) 

But in Karachi, there was some other force at work. I became reliant on something within that had to get me from day to day. And I think this "something" was my soul.

I lived mercurially in Pakistan because it was a challenge becoming acquainted in Karachi. It wasn't always safe and warm and happy. Sometimes I was lonely and afraid or fed-up and suffocated. I slept in fear of death and of myself. Who was this stranger who stared at the ceiling in the stagnant night and lived so intrinsically? She looked back at me in the mirror, her face angular and intense, eyes focused and real.

My friendships were my life supports. I became completely dependent on voicing my opinions in this blog and on my attendance to Jamat Khana.
My discomfort was something to be endured, because there was a lesson at the end and I knew that I could solve it if I'd felt it enough.

And this was the glory of Pakistan for me.

There may be something or someone which does this to you, (which makes you have to reach into those turbid depths of your self and find something clear and hard and bright)-- and when you do find it, never let it go.

Those strengths I found in Karachi are somewhere in the heart of myself; it has been an exquisite challenge to find them and evoke them.

And indeed I must evoke them because I want to be complete! Nothing is really "whole" in what we encounter. Every country and every place and person is strong in some way or the other and it is all beautiful from some obscure angle.

So embrace those strengths of others and embrace those wonderful idiosyncrasies of your own, too. Because at one point or another, they may be all you've got (this is a rough re-phrasing of what Dan has mentioned to me more than once.) And what you already have is more than enough to get you to where you need to be.

Aap Khayal Rakna