What is “coming home?”

Hi Reader,

Words suck.

…he says, necessarily using words.

There’s a reason I put a poem in the P.S. in my last email. Because when I think about trying to describe the experience of coming home, I just want to give it up as impossible. Words can’t do the job. Or they can only in poetry.

I’m not really interested in writing poetry, so I need a different angle. The far end of the spectrum from poetry is probably technical writing. I won’t subject you to that. I try to avoid pedantry.

…he says, being pedantic.

Ok, let’s try a parable. That seems like a happy medium between poetry and pedantry. We’ll do this parable in the second person, because I guess I have it in for fourth walls or something.

Imagine you go someplace, like a park or a museum. A place you haven’t been before but which isn’t particularly unusual or remarkable. Go ahead and take a few moments to establish some of the details. Trees or art or structures or animals or, anything you want, really. It’s your parable.

As you walk around this place, a feeling of deja vu starts to grow on you. It seems familiar. The feeling grows stronger as you look around.

Soon, the “other side” of the deja vu disappears. Now there’s no cognitive dissonance; you’re absolutely sure you’ve been here before. You just didn’t remember at first. You continue to explore, trying to recall where you know this place from and what it means to you.

A fragment of a memory comes back to you. There’s something about that thing right there that speaks to you. You can almost remember a time when you were a child, or maybe this is the kind of thing people are talking about when they say they remember past lives?

Just as the memory is about to wash over you and you’re going to to realize you aren’t just remembering a dream or something—BAM—the sense is gone. You look around, and the place is completely ordinary again. Just as unfamiliar as any other place you’ve been in for only a couple of minutes.

This little parable gets at what the experience of coming home is like. It feels a bit like deja vu, giving you the thought, “I’ve been here/done this before.”

But it’s also more than that. It’s also a sense of belonging, like there’s nowhere else you should be. Maybe even nowhere else you could be. A feeling that you’re supposed to be here, wherever here is.

On top of both those feelings, there’s also the feeling that there’s absolutely nothing wrong. That you don’t have to do anything or be anything or say anything because you’re completely taken care of, completely satisfied, completely at peace.

No one could do anything to take this experience away from you, because no one would do anything to take it away. There is no conflict, no striving, no suffering. Nothing but absolute recognition, absolute connection, absolute fulfillment, absolute love.

I don’t really have a “knack” for experiencing this yet. I don’t have any detailed cosmology to attach to it. I don’t know if it means anything (I suspect it transcends meaning).

I just know that, on the few occasions I have experienced it (even, perhaps the ones I’ve forgotten), I’m overcome with the sense of “ooooohhhhh, THIS is it. This is everything.”

And, at least for that little while I can hold onto it, everything is enough.