Trying to Get Home
Getting home, going home, finding your way back home against great odds are all themes that have appeared and continue to appear in literature, songs, and popular culture.
From The Odyssey to The Wizard of Oz and beyond. We continue to tell stories about home because the idea of home is one that resonates deeply with humans.
The appearance of home
Sometimes home appears as a fixed, physical place, like a particular house, or town. Sometimes, it’s harder to pin down.
It can be a memory of having felt connected and accepted, and a longing to return to that.
It can be the memory of a certain period of your life, one that seemed to contain qualities that are no longer apparent to you.
Taking home with you
Part of the appeal of taking your home with you, in a camper or RV, is simple.
When you always have your home with you, you can travel and never miss the feeling home provides. Turtles carry their homes with them, why can’t we? Well, actually, we already do, we’ve just forgotten it.
What the stories and songs share is a belief that “home” is an elusive place, or state of being, one that is often difficult or impossible to return to. “You can’t go home again” is a message that’s often a part of stories or songs about going home.
By confusing home with a place or a state of mind, we miss an essential truth about exactly what it is we think we’re looking for.
So we believe we’re only home when a certain combination of physical, psychological, or emotional conditions are met. But what if we’re always already home and just don’t know it?
Home isn’t someplace we go. Home is what we are; it’s baked into us. Home doesn’t exist as a thought; it exists as a feeling, i.e., we feel it in our bodies. Thinking about home isn’t something we want; feeling home is what we’re longing for. If you don’t feel at home, thinking about home won’t get you there. That’s why it can seem that you’re home sometimes, and not home other times.
Feeling at home in ourselves isn’t something most of us seem to experience. That explains a lot about why the idea of returning home has such a pull on us, and why we assume getting home will be some combination of luck, hard work, and a long journey.
The truth about home
The truth is, the only thing that makes us unable to feel at home in ourselves is the belief that sometimes we’re able to meet the conditions necessary to feel at home, and sometimes we’re not. In other words, we think ourselves away from home.
Have you ever noticed yourself longing for a feeling of home when you felt peaceful and settled?
I’d guess not, because peaceful and settled is what our idea of home feels like.
When we don’t feel peaceful and settled, and let’s face it, we don’t always feel that way, the idea of home exerts its pull on us. It can start as a niggling feeling that something’s missing. Wanting to “go home” is an attempt to fill that place that seems to be missing or empty.
In truth, the journey home is much shorter and less complicated than it appears, because the only distance that needs to be traveled is from yourself to yourself.
You can’t get any farther or closer to yourself than you already are. You’ll never find home if you continue to look in the wrong place.
What can change everything is a willingness to find home within you, simply by looking inward and allowing yourself to be still. That’s the place you’ll find home. In fact, it’s the only place you’ll find the home you’re looking for, the one that’s always part of you, and is always waiting patiently for you to remember. Welcome home.
If you liked this blog, please check out my other articles.
