365 Ways To Wellbeing – 251st Way
A tree is a tree, a rock is a rock, a road is a road and nothing more. Mere inanimate objects. Until there is a story…
I remember that I sat on a rock alongside a road to my childhood home under my umbrella on a pouring rain and waited my mom to pick me up. I swam on a bay on a sunny summer day, watching swallows flying high above, laughed with my friends and stared at the fire on an evening dusk. I felt the wind blowing my hair as my father drove fast with our boat. We were heading on the island and passed that peculiar shaped tree every time we went there. A rock, a road, a tree – those inanimate objects were slowly turning into something meaningful, I was attaching feelings and stories into them.
That is how you get rooted to a place. You give meanings everything that surrounds you. You make the landscape alive. The longer you stay in one place the more meanings you obviously attach to things. And I think it’s just good. It is of course important to see the world and visit different places, to open your horizons. But more older I get more important are the things that are familiar. Things that have a story. I feel there’s a strong connection between our wellbeing and our roots. Our roots give us a feeling that we belong somewhere. They remind us where we are coming from and what’s our story. They remind us of our mistakes and successes. They remind us who we are.
Both me and my husband´s roots are on the shores of lake Puruvesi. We both have spent a lot of time on that lake when we´ve been children. Now when we have our boat home we’ve spent more and more time on that same lake. And actually, on the very same islands we used to go when we were young. .
This summer we were boating only on lake Puruvesi with our bigger boat. Why so? Simply because we didn´t want to go anywhere else. We felt that we don´t need to go anywhere else. Everything that we wanted to do and all the places we wanted to go were on that lake. So this summer we spent as much time as possible in places we felt the most comfortable with. Places where our roots are.
This day we took our boat to a new home harbor. It’s not in Savonlinna anymore and not right in front of our home. From this day on our home harbor is on the shore of lake Puruvesi. That’s the place we want to be as much as possible also in the future. It was a big thing symbolically, a very good and meaningful one 🙂
Read more about my “Wellbeing Challenge 2013 – 365 ways to wellbeing”.
