Roots and restlessness

We arrive in the middle of a story. Before we have a name for ourselves, there are names behind us, ways of looking at the world, and ideas about what a life ought to become. An inheritance can be felt long before it is understood.

Mine was a spiritual inheritance. My ancestors were yogis; piety belonged to the family into which I was born. But an inheritance is only the beginning of the conversation. Each life must find its own way of answering.

My temperament added a little mischief to the question. I was drawn to experience, to movement, to whatever lay around the next corner. The world seemed full of invitations, and I was rarely inclined to leave them unopened.

Must we resemble our roots in every visible way? A tree does not grow by returning to the earth. It reaches outward, becoming something its roots make possible but cannot entirely predict.

That is the space this story inhabits: affection for what came before, and curiosity about what might come next. The old questions remain. The life that asks them is my own.