Home

Our lives can be thought of as lines that slowly fade into existence when we are conceived, become much more solid when we are born, and end when we die. The path of any given life is, of course, so much richer than that, but let’s spend a few moments following the lines of lives, noticing the patterns they form.

Like many animals, we humans have an inbuilt desire for a familiar place that feels safe: a den, nest, lair, or pair of loving arms tenderly encircling, holding, cradling. This comes at least in part from our earliest experience of the womb, where all our needs were met, all pains were softened through a thick cushion of tissue and fluid, and we had not yet attained sufficient complexity of mind to recognize the competition and discontent built into the world in which we would soon find ourselves.

Our word for this place is home.

Home is what we call the place to which the lines of our lives return most often. Again and again we leave our home, striking out into a world that is both far bigger than we can comprehend and full of more ideas and experiences and things than we could ever hope to interact with, to accomplish some small task that we believe will help us live longer or richer lives. Each such journey is a loop in our line consisting of a going and a returning; we go out for food; for an evening with friends; for stamps from the post office; to take a course at university; to take our children to soccer practice. And each time, we return with fuller stomachs or minds or hearts to that place we call home, where we feel safe to integrate our experiences or make use of the new things we have acquired.

We execute these loops many times a day, such that our lives take on this pattern of transition; coming and going, leaving and returning. Our years consist of thousands of such loops.

Occasionally our home changes. Due to our decision or the decisions of others, we must find a new place, travel to a new land, seek a new center for our lives. The pattern shifts, moves over, moves on. But the loops continue.

Until they stop. One day, the line of your life will end. Perhaps it will be at home, and perhaps it will be in the middle of a loop. We can’t know, though we have secret hopes for how it will come to pass.

Most of us tend to think of this termination as the end of the line, for we can’t truly know what our consciousness or soul perceives after. Even those of us who believe in some kind of continued existence — reincarnation or an afterlife — have a biological fear of and inability to comprehend our own line’s endpoint. We spend many of our loops avoiding thinking about it.

But if home is the place you return to the most frequently, the place you spend the most time, the place someone is most likely to find you, then all we need do is zoom out a bit to see that at the end of our line, we have simply returned to the place we were before it started, where we spent more than 13 billion years: not existing at all.

From the universe’s perspective, nonexistence is our home. While we are busy following the line of our lives through thousands of loops, from a bigger perspective we are simply traveling through a single loop that is that life.

When the fear of death interrupts you on one of your loops, perhaps it will help to remind yourself that you’re not headed someplace new; you’re just headed home.