Hi Reader,

I've heard there are two questions that seem eternally valuable to ask yourself.

What do I want?

...and...

What am I afraid of?

I've been inquiring into that first one for a little more than a year now. I started seriously asking myself the second one a month or two ago.

So I'm far from a longtime firsthand knower of the value of these questions. I have them in Level 2 knowing, probably not much progress toward Level 3.

Still, I can say that, so far, the inquiry seems to have been leading me toward greater clarity.

There's one really interesting thing, though. I'm worried about sharing it with you. It feels weird in a way I'm not sure I want to—or could—describe. So I'll skip the feeling for now and just tell you the insight:

What I want is an end to suffering. To be at peace. To not worry. To feel at home—ahh... to come home.

What I'm afraid of is... well, it's the same thing. I'm afraid of coming home.

At first I thought that sounded crazy. Maybe it is. But I've been looking at it, and it does seem to make a kind of sense. Most of my time is spent dealing with my suffering. Mitigating the things that make me uncomfortable, so that they can be replaced by the next batch of uncomfortable things. Creating imagined issues in my head and then daydreaming about how I can resolve them.

I'm realizing that I'm a problem-solving machine, pretty much all the time.

So what would it be like if there were no problems? No suffering?

I have no idea.

And that's really scary.

It feels like if I were to come home that whatever I think of as "I" would cease to exist.

I've heard that those who go through that experience discover a deeper sense of "I." I've even heard them try to describe it. I think I myself have written a lot about it, but mostly from the outside looking in.

That's funny. I write about coming home, only from the perspective of peeking in through the windows.

I'll say more about this next week.

In the meantime: what do you want? And what are you afraid of? (I've asked these questions before, but the answers change so I would love to hear from you again—or for the first time.)