The Scent of Home – Pomegranate Blog
Monday-Friday
9 AM - 9 PM
Saturday&Sunday
10 AM - 6 PM
Our Blog

The Scent of Home

The Scent of Home
12-Jul

I once heard that travel is the only thing you can buy that will make you richer – richer in knowledge.

Travelling back home

It was a long trip back to SA…. at the airport at 7.00 am, the eight-hour flight, then a queue for the rental car, and a half an hour drive home. Despite all of that, I love exploring my own country, South Africa. There is still so much to see of it, dry “dorps”, rustic towns, untouched coastline, and safari bushveld, they are all just so unique and beautiful, and a great learning indeed! There’s something satisfying about coming home, and only when we get home that we make sense of that long trip, and for me being home is valuable and valued.

Shaaista in South Africa
Shaaista in africa

 

Coming home is about being in our communities and our familiar surroundings and sharing our stories. It’s about friends and family reuniting, exploring, learning, loss, and disturbance.

Disturbance creates learning. Perhaps a compelling reason is what moves us into a place where we did not expect to be, which can be a welcoming change. Losing people that we hold dear is a form of learning that enables us to establish new beginnings. Our own ignorance is sometimes a blessing in disguise. It’s not always about comfort, or security, rather inner contentment is what matters the most.

Travelling broadens our horizons, it brings us face to face with new people, unfamiliar environment, new knowledge, new friends. Travelling changes our perspective so that, when we return, we are never the same. We learn by travelling, like by reading a book or spending a year in India. How we apply it, is the learning. The more we travel the more we learn, and greater is the hunger for more.

Few weeks back I was in Dubai watching the city from my balcony scurrying about below me, smelling the hot, humid air, hearing the sounds of different languages being spoken, interacting with different nationalities. In all of that I got to understand their pressures, their experiences, some of which I shared as we grew stronger bonds that created new meaning.

If we never return home, never return to what we know, we can lose our roots, lose our perspective, get caught up in whirlpool of the new, losing touch with the old. Our legacy, our history is as important as our future, as it grounds us.

In any learning experience, whatever the subject, we need to create the initial disturbance for change to occur, but we also need to anchor it back into our everyday realities, to tell the story of change.

Shaaista Dawood,
Senior Corporate Trainer & English Teacher
Pomegranate Institute