Adjective
Tied to a post or fixed to the ground with a rope or chain
Attached to something
Closely connected with something, and changing when it changes
Home is having that one person near that you feel comfortable asking to go back to your flat and fetch you some underwear when you’ve ended up in hospital – and not worrying about the dust bunnies or period stains they will find when searching through your things.
I believe it is this feeling of being fully known, with all your mess and stains, and being accepted regardless, that gives us the strength to venture out and face the unknown, or, harder, the horribly familiar. Eventually, all these period-stained intimacies and supposed weaknesses combine to form a connection that makes any place feel like your place because your people are there.
When I try to visualise these connections, I see a hot air balloon. With one rope safely on the ground in the hands of someone who’ll help me find my bearings, I can dance and bob across the sky, find what lies behind the most thunderous clouds, because however well or badly I fare, I know I have a place of safe return. And it is the unquestionability of my connections that allows me to bob with such abandon.
The ropes can get strained. It can feel like there is not enough give, like they are holding you back from an ever-greater promise of freedom. But being without ropes, fully untethered, that is like floating in space without up and down, without self, really. Because it’s through being known that we know ourselves. In the absence of an other who sees us, truly, how would we exist?
Over the years I have been lucky to throw ropes in many places, to travel further and wider across the sky with a feeling of safety. But I have started holding ropes too, giving others the confidence to soar. Finding the right balance between holding and soaring, between all one’s ropes, must be anyone’s greatest achievement in life.
When I think of paradise, and by that I mean a state in which humans live in harmony with each other and the planet, I picture a myriad of hot air balloons, tethered to each other, through strands of dust bunnies and stained underwear, loosely bobbing around the greatest globe of all.
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