In thinking about returning home

It's nearly time for me to pack my bags and go home. While I have a few weeks and I'm a last-minute packer, it doesn't feel that close (yet) but I realise I've got to start tying things up here. While I get emotionally and mentally ready to leave France, I find the bigger task is to prepare myself to go back home.

So I've started to try to engage my 'roots' so that I can truly be the better person I've felt in me with those at home. You know, that freshness, that openness, that positivity, that tolerance and ease that are kind of the only ways you can make things around you pleasant- in foreign or familiar environments.

I've been thinking about who I am in respect to those around me and realise that I have probably not been the ideal daughter, nor the ideal sister. I realise that these people have rights over me that, perhaps, I've ignored. They deserve better from me but alhamdulillah I can now see where and how I can resolve (at least some of) those shortcomings on my part.

I was given the following poem to read by Khalil Gibran:

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

http://www.katsandogz.com/onchildren.html

It made me think about the nature of our families. It made me think about our responsibilities towards our future and our past, towards our children as well as our parents. From goodness comes goodness and we hope to just increase the goodness through this chain. 

As the dynamics between parents and children change, as they do in all relationships, I pray that children return the love and respect of their parents while parents make it easier for the children to do this by not sowing resentment in their hearts.