Coming back home after a longer journey is always a challenge. You were making plans, seeing new places, people, and ways to live, adapting to them, and learning to enjoy them. Now, you’re back where everything is familiar again.
Like going away in the first place, it can be disorienting. And it’s because you’re overwhelmed by the same thing: a new self to embrace. Even if the new self is your old self.
As I’m writing this, I’ve just arrived back in Austria after traveling through Mexico for a month, so this feels acute to me right now. But if you’ve been on holiday, you’re probably also familiar with this. You’re back home, still filled with all the experiences, although they are only memories now. Slowly your old life starts to enter again. Whether you look forward with joy or dread only reflects how much you like what you expect.
It’s a release to get back into old routines because they make the transition to your old self smoother. You could be adopting your favorite morning ritual, visiting family, or starting to work right away. Those are all ways to enter back into your old life, with its known plans and challenges. They take away the disorientation between your journey-self and your home-self. You might be so good at this transition that you don’t even notice it.
But this is a pity because in the space between the fading of memories and the arrival of expectations lies peace. Because something else pops up there, which is much more difficult to catch than either the memories or the plans and expectations.
Before I show what it is, I want to draw some parallels to another practice, which is very similar to what I’ve described just now. We engage in it to be in this place of just having arrived after a long journey. This practice is nothing else than meditation. When we settle in meditation, we are looking for our memories, our past, to fade, while we don’t want plans and expectations to enter our minds instead. We have our breath, bodily sensations, or loving-kindness as an anchor to remind us of this.
In meditation, we don’t strengthen a past self, even if it has some spiritual or joyous insights. We don’t want to relive old experiences, nor do we engage in planning. We want to be in the time and place, where the memories fade and the plans haven’t yet entered.
When we come home after a journey, the state we arrive in, what is it? Can we even describe it without the memories or the plans? No. There is nothing to describe it. We are not away anymore but not yet back. It’s the place where the stories of where we come from and go to stop. It’s where we are left when the memories fade and the plans haven’t fully arrived at. It’s also the place where you are during meditation when you stop narrating to yourself where you’re going or coming from. We can say this place is emptiness, nothingness, or void, but these words only describe our inability to describe it. It’s where the narration and thoughts stop, but the experience is rich.
In reality, this is where we always are. It’s no destination because we can’t arrive there. In the same way, you can’t arrive at the device you’re reading this from or put on the socks you’re wearing. You’re already there. All it takes is the dropping away of all that clouds your awareness of it. Including any effort to arrive there.
And then find out how free it is there.
Have a wonderful day,