Somewhere To Breathe

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I find it difficult to describe a definitive personal experience of sanctuary. Perhaps this is due to the fact that I am a young person and simply do not have enough life experience to draw upon. However I will do my best to describe the ideas I have about what sanctuary means.

In my opinion sanctuary does not necessarily have to be a place. It can be an inanimate object, another living organism, a thought, a memory, anything that gives you a sense of inner tranquility. It might just be a secluded place where you feel comfortable, such as your bedroom, or a place of worship or astonishing natural beauty in which you feel close to God or connected to nature. You might feel that God Himself is the best sanctuary of all. However I believe the most important element to sanctuary is safety. It is something that brings you a sense of acceptance, both of yourself and your circumstances. At the same time you feel as though you are being accepted, that you are not alone but are being understood and listened to. Sanctuary can be a friendly smile or a comforting shoulder to cry on, or maybe a much-loved book or poem. Music, too, is something many people (including myself) find solace in, and thus could be described as a sort of sanctuary. I think another aspect of sanctuary is that it endures and has a sense of permanence. You can turn to it any time and it will always have the same innate qualities as it did when it first gave you peace of mind, even if its surface has changed over time.

When I was younger, I might have said that my sanctuary was my imagination, because it was a softer, less troubling place than the world I was living in. When my angst got too much for me, I would withdraw to my invented Paradise and forget that I was just a lonely adolescent girl. While to some extent I still subscribe to the view that the imagination is a great source of contentment, I am aware that it can sometimes do anything but induce feelings of purity and calm. Like other sanctuaries, it may cause you to experience a kind of pleasant bewilderment, but the imagination may also be a disturbing place that leaves you disoriented and out of touch with reality, if it is not held in check or channelled in some productive way.

On the whole, sanctuary is something that allows your heart and mind to breathe. You don't have to struggle with yourself or put on any silly pretensions there, because you feel no need to. You can just be, without dwelling on past pains or agonizing over questions of what the future holds. In fact, you are so grounded in your present that the concept of time ceases to have any meaning. You almost feel you could stay in that place, or with that person or object, for an eternity.