This was one of the last assignments from my writing class last semester.
Promt: Write about your most deeply held belief in under 500 words
We’re all on our way home; the great pilgrimage. It’s not yet at the center of everything I do, but it’s what I want. It’s funny how I constantly find myself doing the things I don’t want to do, yet not doing the things I do want. But home is what I want, and I know that. People should belong here, just like everything else. Just like trees dig roots into the ground upon which they fell as a seed. Swallows have not found their trees and nests ill fitting, nor do fish complain of the sea.
Yet somehow I myself and many others have felt alienated by the world around us. We have all we need to grow and live, yet there is an emptiness that I cannot deny as part of my being. The ticking of seconds on my watch sometimes catches my eye. I’ll look at it, perplexed, wanting to know how I fit into that ticking. I constantly find myself asking if there is anything more than those ticks that I could exist within.
The world around me is mad. As humans, we’re all insane in our own way. We all do what we don't want and don't do what we do want. We have a difficult time admitting to ourselves or anyone else that we are tired, hurt, lost, in pain. It is even more difficult to admit that we could have caused those things in someone else. Why all this struggle? Why does something in this world feel ill fitting? I look at the world around me and feel different, separate from it. I ask myself if I belong quite often. And if I do, where do I belong?
This is my greatest question, and yet my deepest belief. It is a question that has undefined and redefined me over and over since I began asking it. Questions, in their very nature, are in opposition to answers and yet I see them as something definite. No one can tamper with them, no one can take them away from me.
I take comfort in sharing my question with the rest of humanity. I feel comradeship in the mystery of seeking home. In our insanity, I believe we all have a sense that we are lost. We can sense that all is not right in the world. Whether home is something that we wandered from at the beginning of our lives, or if we have never been there in the first place does not interest me. I am interested in the home coming. The question asking. The great pilgrimage.