A lot of us leave our homes and move out whetfor school, college, job in another city or something that requires us to be someplace else. Adulting requires us to get out of our comfort zones and into the big bad world. It is safe to say that while we are with them, we definitely drive each other crazy, but it is only after you have spent time away from them, that you truly cherish the relationship and their value in your life. 

As they say, distance makes the heart grow fonder. There are so many ways in which staying away from our families makes us evolve and brings us closer to them.

Vanessa Jimin

>

Not just that but also, having ‘ghar-ka-khana’. Remember the time when your mom would pack you a tiffin box filled with parantha and achar which you detested then, but badly crave for now? Every morning when your mom would knock on the door to ask you to get some work done and you would cringe at it and pretend to sleep. And then she would nag for the rest of the day. But today, you miss how nobody knocks at your door or nags anymore. And you definitely can’t pretend to go off to sleep. The comfort and the security that home came with, makes us miss it even more.

And so we reach out. We talk to them with so much kindness because we want to feel the closeness.

You get to know yourself better in order to know your family better.

Realisations come with maturity and maturity comes with experiences.

As we grow older, it is important that we feel the need to expose ourselves to the outside world and staying out gives us exactly that opportunity.

It is essential that we leave our comfort zones; our homes. One must allow oneself to see the world from a different perspective and feel the things one has never felt before. Like feeling homesick, for example. To know and understand our parents better, we must try and know thy selves better. We often forget that our parents are individuals too, just like us. We become more empathetic and understanding only with experience.

You’re constantly reminded about the small things that your family did which you otherwise never paid any attention to.

Nostalgia is a very complicated feeling. It makes one feel happy and sad at the same time. Living away from our family makes all of us love the uniqueness in our parents as individuals. There will be times when little things would remind you of how your mother sang to herself while cooking and the chai at the canteen smells exactly like your dad’s. A conversation with a friend would suddenly make you think about how your mom and dad love travelling but you had never noticed that earlier because they would never travel a lot while you stayed with them.

There are so many things we all realise only after we have moved away from our parents.

You start getting worried if your mom hasn’t called you in 24 hours.

Our childhood is brimming with memories about how we would try and avoid any conversation with our parents whatsoever. Our conversations were short and to the point. Well, that is the beauty of Indian parents.

So, the other night when my mom called me and asked me what I had for dinner, I told her I hadn’t had anything yet. “Why?”, she anxiously questioned. I was simply amazed at how worried she sounded, my mother who was thousands of miles away, at something that wouldn’t even qualify as a problem in my waking life. But the irony of this situation is that if she misses even a day without calling me once, I start getting worried. It is rather funny but I would name it as ‘ritual’, something that keeps them connected to me and I to them.

And, this is true for the most of us. 

Whenever you do meet your parents, every moment counts.

You stop taking your parents for granted.

The time when you stayed with them, all you wanted was to be set free. You wanted to spend most of your time with your friends. Your time was not theirs completely even though you were physically present with them. Staying out made you stay in the present even more. So now, every time you visit your parents twice or thrice in a year, you enjoy every bit with them. Watch them cook for you, go shopping with them, clean with them and just blend into their daily routine, their life. And for any human, spending quality time should be more important than spending quantity time, don’t you think?

All of us are on our own adventures. We are explorers who are writing our stories one day at a time, learning new things about the world and ourselves. And now, that our family is so far away from us, we haven’t ever felt closer to them.