When I Ran To India

Five years ago. I ran and I didn’t look back.

When I was there, I still wanted to run. To the next bus, next town, I couldn’t bare to sit still. I told everyone I was there to find myself, until I realised that I was there to lose myself completely.

I wanted the world to absorb me. I wanted to be unseen. I wanted to disappear into the swarm of bodies. But, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get lost. India is a place of humanity, the people, their faith, their hope, their resolve, their humour, their curiosity, they remind you, of all that you are and how you ought to be – human, unapologetically.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the experience created a movement within me, a revolution of self, slowly to surface through the years.

That revolution has now begun. I can feel it, the surge within me, it’s a sort of magic. I have never felt so seen by me, so accepted, so loved. I have never seen others so truely, loved so deeply, and accepted with such compassion. India taught me this, to be good, to do good, and to live a life that is just my own.

Now, I don’t want to run anywhere, for I am home, in the city that I know and love. I just wish to simply return, back there, to the place that taught me the greatest lesson of all, that home is wherever I am – and there’s just no running from it.