How to Feel at Home
I have arrived here at my brother’s house in Chapel Hill, where I will be staying for the summer while he and his family are in England. So, basically, this is home for me right now, but of course this is not my home, which got me thinking about what it really means to feel at home.
It sort of means being where you’re comfortable. Which kind of means where your stuff is. Right? Or, at least, where you keep your stuff…when you’re not carrying it around with you.
Which got me thinking about George Carlin’s famous Stuff routine. Which is so funny because it’s so true.
Which got me thinking about how much stuff I’ve got. And then about something Ajahn Sucitto said in one of his talks, about how we can never really have anything because as soon as we get it, we don’t want it, because it’s not really the thing we want, it’s some idyllic state of satisfaction we project onto the thing (he calls it the “glow”), which is not in the thing itself, only in our perception of the thing.
So when we get the thing we want, we feel the momentary relief from the tension of wanting of it, but then right away we realize that what we have is just a thing — that the idyllic state of satisfaction we wanted, which we thought we’d get with the thing, isn’t there — so we didn’t really get what we wanted, and then we feel the lack of that, so we start to want something else.
Hmmm.
So what would it be like not to believe in the idyllic state of satisfaction we think will come with whatever it is that we currently don’t have, but want, and instead to just relax into the state of peace that’s already there when we’re not wanting it.
Maybe that’s what it really means to feel at home.
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Click here to listen to Ajhan Sucitto’s talk about wanting and having.