Lights Will Guide You Home

Each year, the blue and white Christmas lights at the Ateneo de Manila University campus light up as the holiday season approaches. And it is a beautiful sight. The fright in nightly jogs is gently lifted off your shoulders, and gently replaced with wonder. The path (however repeated nightly) is remembered better in illumination.

Apart from serving their obvious purpose, to me those lights meant one more thing: I was going to be home soon. As much as university life away from home is a liberating (I dare say necessary) experience, there is an unspeakable joy in coming home for Christmas. There is joy in being in a place where processed food isn't a staple. Yes, there is joy even in once again having a curfew.

As much as we are enthralled with new, bolder experiences, there is warmth in familiarity. It is warmth that is always worth going back to. We appropriate to the above feeling the name "nostalgia." However, nostalgia holds more bearing than we give it credit for. You see, nostalgia was never meant to purely depict sentiment. And it is a disservice to dismiss it as such.

The ancient Greeks described it as a longing for the place from which the very essence of all things - for example, the "blue-ness of blue" - originated. And that's a particularly beautiful insight. If seen in this light, nostalgia does not only refer to the warm, fuzzy feeling we equate with things once familiar. Instead, it is a longing for the place where hearts are light, where love and comfort abound - that is, where we are most ourselves: a place we popularly refer to as home.

But how exactly do we get home? Albeit an oversimplification of some pretty obscure philosophy, we make our way there by following the light.

In "The Allegory of the Cave," Plato depicts men in chains watching, with fixed gaze, shadows representing adulterated reality. Elsewhere in the same cave, there is a man enduring a climb to a place outside the cave, where the light that forms the shadows emanates. Thankfully, he eventually makes it out of the cave. What he once saw as silhouettes, he now sees in true form. It is all too overwhelming at the outset, but he knows with certainty that he cannot return to a world of "lesser" truth. He soon returns to the cave, presumably in service to his fellow man, to tell the others to follow suit.

Allegory of the Cave illustrated (from www.john-uebersax.com)

Now, what do we stand to learn from all this? (I did not wish to bore you with that primer on Plato, however necessary a read I think him be.) If there is something we can derive from all that has been said, it is this: just as the man in the allegory endures the climb, all men must as well endure life - both its excitement and its banality. You see, nostalgia isn't merely a process of blithe reminiscence, but more so a journey home. And it is this tiring journey, sometimes debilitatingly so, that makes life sweeter, that grants upon its conclusion meaning and closure.

However, we are fortunate to have shadows of home today (minus the chains, of course). They consist of all the things we associate with a surface understanding of nostalgia. And sometimes, that's all we really need to get through a semester. Take comfort: home is just around the corner.

Here, I have presented that home can be seen in two lights. Home is first a place of refuge when we are weary, a brief and familiar respite in an otherwise overwhelming metropolis. But secondly, home is also that which meets us at the end of this journey. In either case, home is a consolation for the craziness of life. And home is always welcome.

It has been almost two years since I moved back. The pace is certainly different. The lights in my village do not glow as brightly as the lights in the Ateneo do. They do not glow as brightly as they once did.

Still, it is a beautiful sight. I am here. I am home.

Written by Clarence Aaron Sy of Batch Spectra