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 something, but instead of doing or saying that thing I come up with some reason not to, or to do something else instead.

For example, the other day someone was smoking a cigarette close to where I was playing with my son. We had first claim to the space we were in. I felt the impulse to defend the cleanliness of the air for our benefit, but instead of asking for some space I took my son and retreated. Problem solved, I guess, but upon reflection I saw that I'd let myself down.

I am trying to learn to listen to this thing I call myself (which I suspect may be all there is), and it's surprisingly difficult. In this example, I heard that I wanted clean air for myself and my son, but I missed the other message about standing up for myself and my loved ones in our own spaces. Yes, I avoided a little conflict (which is also something I wanted), but that decision wasn't made because I listened to myself but instead out of an old habit of avoiding even the smallest bit of conflict. That's a self-betrayal of the person I am inviting myself to be today in favor of a more childish version of myself from the past.

An interesting lesson, subtle and difficult. And I'm simultaneously trying to have compassion for myself as I continue to practice.

Idea two:

My son is learning to walk. He's still pretty wobbly, but rather than slowing down to steady himself, he's actually been going faster and faster. My wife and I were discussing his older sister, trying to remember what it was like when she learned to walk. Maybe it was different for her since she didn't have an older sibling to model off of, but the thought that occurs to me now is that our son seems to be working on running before he even gets walking down.

And that made me wonder if that's the way for all of us: if the only way to master something is to move beyond it. Maybe nobody really learns to walk until they start to run. That in turn reminded me of something Usain Bolt said: "I trained four years to run only nine seconds."

Life is always happening in bursts of this-moment-ness. How can it be any other way than that I've been training my whole life for this one? At the same time, how seriously have I been taking it? (How seriously should I take it?)

As an extension of the walking/running analogy: I continue to have the experience that the more I learn, the less I know. Maybe I can't really learn anything until I start to know nothing.

Idea three:

Inspired by this poem by Catherine Pierce:

I get the impression that growing up isn't really a process of getting bigger, but of identifying more broadly with the world of experience.

Maybe this is just a different way of looking at things. For instance, I could say that tree outside my window has gotten bigger over the past decade. Or I could say that many of the bits of carbon it now identifies as part of itself it used to identify only as part of the air it experienced.

But maybe the impression is actually substantial, like the tree itself. When I was a child, I only wanted my needs met: a full belly, something interesting to play with, nobody upset in my immediate vicinity. Now that I am more grown up, my wants have expanded because my awareness of the world of experience has expanded: a fully belly must be balanced against the discomfort of being unhealthy, much of life involves extended periods of boredom, people being upset almost always has more to do with them than it does with me. Yet despite my growing awareness of this expanded world, my skills for engaging with it remain small: I eat more than I should, I grab for my phone at the slightest hint of approaching mundanity, I flee from conflict instead of standing up for myself and risking irritating others.

I don't see it clearly yet, but it seems inevitable that part of coming home is learning to take ever greater responsibility for myself and my experience. That home is not a place or even just an experience, but rather a ongoing, increasingly skilled interaction with my ever-expanding self.

Idea four:

It's curious that humans appear to be about halfway between the smallest and largest things in the universe.

The visible universe looks to be about 10^26 meters across, and the Planck length is 10^-35 meters. Humans are about 10^0 meters tall.

If we put all those numbers on a scale from 1-9, Planck is 1, Universe is 9, and Humans are in the 3-4 range. So logarithmically, we're 3x up from the bottom and then it's 3x up from us to the top. That puts us halfway in the middle.

Is this just numerology? Or a coincidence? Or both?

Yeah, maybe. Even probably.

But if life is what I make of it, then it's nice to think that the depth with which I can look into things is mirrored by the distance at which I can look out at them. That my knowledge of the Universe is limited by my knowledge of myself (and vice versa). That maybe, in some unintuitive and ultimately mysterious way, it doesn't matter which way I look because the only thing I ever encounter is myself.

Still, I'm grateful that you're out there—or at least that you appear to be. I love you, and I hope that you love yourself and your life.