Something About Cliché

It all begins in within the warm, cozy, protective walls of the womb. Although our brain has not yet made the neuronal connections necessary to appreciate our environment, in retrospect we can think to ourselves “there is no place like home.” Some philosophers even speculate that our search for love and shelter is our desire to return to the womb.

I can still remember that feeling that I would get when I would return home after several days of camping out in the wilderness. It was that wonderful feeling of gratitude, of coziness, familiarity—“there is no place like home,” I would tell myself while sitting on the toilet grateful for the luxury of a restroom.

What is “really” home though? What about those people that are born to military parents who are never really in one place for very long? Do they experience that gratitude, that sense of coziness that affirms that there is no other place quite like it? Is this cliché really a metaphor that reflects our human tendency to identify with objects?

One day the answer came to me in the most unexpected way. My healthy, vibrant, 16 year old brother unexpectedly dropped to the ground, never to arise again. He died just four days before Christmas, and from that moment on, nothing felt like home anymore. Yet, the intensity of the experience opened my mind up in a very powerful way. “If the body is like a home, what was it that lives in it?” I kept asking myself.

I searched and searched for that illusive some-thing-ness that seems to live within, the self that we are either uncomfortable or comfortable with. I heard someone once accuse me of not being comfortable in my own skin. What is this that can or cannot be comfortable within it’s own skin, within its biological home? When we are proud of ourselves, there is indeed no place like home, but when we are disappointed, we try very hard to escape this home. We go to the bar, look for sex, drugs, anything to escape ourselves, our home.

My search led me to the very realization that home is not what we “think.” That home is the boundless expanse that has not edges, no beginning or ending. Home is eternity, home is this boundless, timeless “now.” The not finding myself, my home, turned out to be the finding. We have always already been home and there is no place like it because there is no place at all.