Coming Home

Hi Reader, Here are two contradictory stories. We were visiting my parents recently and I was complaining about finances and kids and the lack of sleep that results from those things. I felt like I was telling a true story. My dad said something that cut through my bullshit: "Nothing wrong with that. Life is always hard." Also a true story. Now, one more story, bending the truth yet further. A friend mentioned a bumper sticker they'd seen which said, "Life is easy. Golf is hard." Years later,...

Hi Reader, I have encountered my folly particularly impactfully in the last few weeks. It is this: I try to approach everything in order to understand it, but the things I long for—such as this thing I call coming home—are beyond understanding. And in my discomfort and self-judgment at not being able to understand, I withdraw and avoid. A prime example of this is the way I don't maintain eye contact. There is so much information in another person's face and gaze, and I literally can't handle...

Hi Reader, The subject line of this email, "not writing to write," is one of those ambiguous phrases I'm coming to love more and more. Do I mean that writing isn't the point of my writing? Or do I mean that I'm somehow going to write more/better by not writing? The answer is "yes." (This is the most delicious kind of ambiguity.) AND, I'm also letting you know that I won't be visiting your inbox again for a while. My life has very little flex these days, so when something new comes up I need...

Hi Reader, What's a child? I mean, what's the definition of the word child? I was watching my son toddle around this morning and it occurred to me that I probably know more than him about just about everything. (The one exception being what it's like to be him.) But I thought about that in the context of him learning and getting better at things, which is basically all he does. (Actually, maybe that's another exception: he's better than me at learning.) On the one hand, that's not impressive....

Hi Reader, We're on vacation with my parents this week. They get to see their grandkids on trips like this a couple times a year, so obviously that's the focus of the time and conversation. The other night we were talking about the importance of teaching the kids to follow the rules. Generally, I agree that's important. Of course, me being me, I also see some nuance here. Two anecdotes: I'm going through this challenge with the HOA (where I'm president), where some folks have been parking...

Hi Reader, You know, what I really want to do is teach. But the stuff I want to teach about seems non-teachable. Stuff about the spiritual life (as if that's some kind of unified thing I could point to) or meaning and purpose (as if those are externally definable goals as opposed to things you generate for yourself and your life). It occurs to me that what I write about is the art of living (as if I'm any good at it). And what does an art teacher teach? Not art, that's for sure. They teach...

Hi Reader, Idea one: As I have continued to practice this thing I call coming home (which I declare includes everything I do, even when I don't see how or why, and even when I utterly fail at it—or maybe especially then), I hear lots of things that seem to be hints about how to come home more skillfully. One of these hints that's been resonating with me is self-betrayal (a term I hear most frequently from the excellent Arbinger Institute). Self-betrayal is when I have an impulse to do or say...

Hi Reader, This newsletter marks the end of this series. Fittingly, it's about the idea that nothing ends. The last few weeks I've written about the spirituality/empiricism distinction, what God is to me, whether God exists, and I even took a crack at naming an empirical God: SE. I've continued to reflect on these things, and the only thing I want to state about them this week is that to me, saying SE exists is little more than saying there's actually something really real out there (or maybe...

Hi Reader, Last week we looked at this word, "everything." It's like Superman ice cream: hard to tell what flavor it is, or even which one it's trying to be, and also it's a bit silly. The plural flavor of everything is the collective: take all the individual stuffs that exist and talk about them all together. The singular flavor of everything refers to the interconnectedness (and interbeing) of all things, including past and maybe future. And I'll even say it refers to all that as expressed...