Home Is Where Things Fall Apart
I wonder whether this meditation on home would have had a different emotional undercurrent if I’d done it at a time when people I care about weren’t losing their actual homes in a fire. If it had been a few months ago, I would have been thinking about other friends who evacuated their homes amid Helene’s flooding and mudslides and lack of clean water. Of course, this reflection is happening now, and the climate context makes home feel both more urgent and less stable than ever. Comparative suffering would tell me that my own thoughts and feelings about home are embarrassing and hollow when other people are unhoused and hurting. Years of self-compassion practice has mostly convinced me to care about my own experience because pain in its many forms is part of the human experience. When my ability to care for myself for my own reasons falls short, I can usually offer myself a dose of compassion because being a trustworthy container for my own emotions makes me a safer person to those around me who are experiencing their own hard things. I recently heard a Buddhist teacher, Matthew Brensilver, say that honesty is a kind of moral debt and it is owed to others so that they can make sense of their lives. I share this story of searching for the truth of home, in the hopes that it may make home clearer and more accessible to those who yearn to feel it.
I’ve always thought of home as something more than where I lived because throughout my childhood, my parents thought of home as where they were from. My parents both grew up in Kentucky. My mother’s grandmother and some of my mother’s cousins were my dad’s childhood neighbors. Parts of their families were such close friends that my dad’s dad walked my mom’s cousins down the aisle at their weddings after their own father died. Kentucky was the place where the stories that shaped our collective identity took place. Kentucky is where my mom’s mom died when my mom was only fifteen. It’s where she was the oldest of five siblings who had to figure out how to grow up in a beautiful place that was suddenly missing their mother. Those Kentucky stories were never mine, but they shaped my life, too. I knew from the beginning that home is where things can be beautiful and that home can fall apart in ways that are hard to understand. I never lived there, but I used to wonder whether Kentucky was my home, too.
Growing up, my family moved three times. When I was a baby we left my birthplace, Charlotte, North Carolina, to live in Jacksonville, Florida. Then we moved to our first home in Dallas, Texas, when I was two. We moved into my final childhood home across town when I was in the middle of first grade. My parents sold that house sixteen years later, soon after I graduated from college. I lived in Dallas from my first memories through my launch into adulthood, but Texans often talked about how if you weren’t born there you weren’t from there. With my parents from Kentucky and only my sister actually a born Texan, I wondered whether I would ever belong to a place that way. Home became wherever my family got together for the holidays. After college, I tried a lot of places on. In the first five years after graduation, I lived in six different apartments beginning in Costa Rica and then Madrid; and then living in Raleigh, North Carolina; Alexandria, Virginia; Washington, DC; and then Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where I met the person who showed me another kind of home.
My relationship with my husband was the first place I felt safe enough to bring all of the versions of myself that I had ever been and explore all of the versions of myself that I might want to become. Together, we continued to move, though less often than I had done before. We valued flexibility and we moved from Carrboro, North Carolina, to Ithaca, New York, for my husband to go to graduate school and for me to practice law. Two apartments and four years later, we moved to Iowa City, Iowa, for me to try on a career that was within the field of law but that let me step out of directly practicing it. Although I was aware that many of my old friends were buying houses and having families, I liked the version of home where we were responsible for ourselves. I enjoyed that season of life, when home was the name for wherever we found ourselves.
When I turned thirty-five years old, we were living in a beautiful old Victorian house in Iowa City that we rented for what we’d been paying for a weird mold-filled apartment with a hole in the roof back in Ithaca. We often spent our evenings and weekends walking and biking around the city and finding everything lovely, and yet we both ached to return to a place that had sneakily become the first real home of my adulthood. I remember one particular spring day when we were riding bikes on the extensive bike trails in the city and as we passed a park that was absolutely filled with robins hunting for worms, I turned to him and said, “this place is so wonderful, we have to get out of here!” He laughed, but agreed completely. It was a wonderful place, but we wanted to go home.
That is how, after many years of renting, my husband and I eventually bought our first little house as we moved home to Carrboro, North Carolina. We were ready to try the traditional version of home, and we were just about to learn some of the ways that this, too, falls apart. I was so excited not to have to ask a landlord before getting broken things fixed that I didn’t give too much thought to all of the things that could need fixing in the course of a year. I thought that owning a house would mean stability, and in some ways it has. I didn’t know that owning a home would also mean learning that houses want to fall down, but that may be the truest thing about a house.
Literally the first night after closing on that first house, a storm passed through town and the tree right next to our back porch was struck by lightning. This meant that we not only needed to remove the tree but also to replace the hot water heater that had died by electrocution. That was the first of what would be many reminders that houses are always trying to fall down. Something is always breaking or wearing out or needing a fresh coat of paint or some other adjustment, and this isn’t even a sign that it’s going wrong. This is just what houses do.
People often say that bad things happen in threes, and that seems particularly true in home ownership. For instance, it wasn’t a month after that lightning strike took out the tree and the hot water heater that we needed a new refrigerator and replaced a leaky toilet. This happens. In the moment when things go wrong precipitously with a house, it is so easy to slide into the story that you bought a money pit, or that this house might actually ruin your life, or maybe you’ve forgotten some terrible thing you did to someone along the way that merits the fact that you’re now cursed. But things break and houses want to fall down.
There is no house that will last forever, and that’s not a sign that it’s failing. Houses are simply impermanent, despite how inconvenient that is. Even those of us who are lucky enough to own a house, even one we are actively grateful for, could spend the whole of our lives being in a pitched battle with the impermanent nature of home repairs. It isn’t the house or its impermanence that creates the suffering. The impermanence of homeownership is just true. It’s the way I relate to impermanence that makes it so painful, and changing that relationship is possible and takes practice. When we are faced with challenges beyond our control, the greatest source of potential for change is often in the way we manage our own minds.
We are gathered here, around thoughts of home, in a particularly precarious era. This is a time when we know that much worse is possible than a house trying to age and crumble into oblivion. Homes are increasingly uninsurable because the evolving state of nature has shown that a single storm or a powerful wind fueling a fire can wipe so many houses away in an instant that whole neighborhoods, cities, and regions will never look the same. We all know this threat in a graphic and granular way because we have watched it happen over and over again through the screens on our phones.
The impermanence of homeownership, both ordinary and disaster expedited, is only the second most uncomfortable impermanence for most people. Beneath almost every human fear is the discomfort of our own impermanence. We feel the danger of this era in our bodies even as some of us are trying to find our way home to ourselves in our bodies. Just as houses aren’t meant to last forever, neither are bodies. This simple fact is just a part of the human experience, and nothing is more poignant.
The impermanence may be part of what has made me so curious about how to create a peaceful relationship with my body while I have it, but I think it was also an echo of my basic yearning for home. When an external sense of home was hard to nail down, maybe it made me hungry for some internal place to arrive and belong. Regardless, I have spent a huge amount of time over more than a decade learning to make a home within myself. My particular life experiences and inclination toward anxiety may have made this work especially resonant for me, but I’ve learned through years of sharing my work that many kinds of people get disconnected from their embodied experience and the comfort that is possible within themselves. For instance, many people who occupy bodies and identities outside a very narrow band of what society deems acceptable may find it challenging to access that inner-home because of stigma and the ways that it creates both internal and external barriers.
In case a specific example would make this more concrete, one influential system of disconnection is what is often called “diet culture.” It blends anti-fat bias and medical weight stigma, while reinforcing the culturally dominant habit of moralizing food and bodies and simultaneously conflating thinness and health. In explicit and subtle ways over time this culture teaches people to be at war with their bodies and their basic human needs rather than in relationship with the wisdom the body contains. In my own experience of being on my first diet at age ten, I know how it feels to become habituated to ignore the body. This common disconnect makes it much harder to access the emotions and sensations of the present moment. Since living can’t happen in our minds imagining the future or remembering the past, reconnecting with the felt sense of the present moment experience is a crucial way to access the fullness of life.
The very idea of coming home to the body can feel ridiculous, since the body never left. Instead, this shift is about remembering and befriending the body, which can be hard for people who are in the habit of punishing or silencing the body. For me, the habit of self-criticism was so strong, it could overwhelm the present moment experience if I wasn’t careful. I found that compassion practices created an environment that was more conducive to present moment awareness. This step was so important that when I first started teaching meditation classes, I always taught what I called compassion-first mindfulness. While my teaching is more varied these days, the compassion-first approach continues to be a potent strategy for many who want to develop the ability to be with hard truths as they appear.
No truth is more difficult to face than impermanence. Even young and fit bodies will eventually fall apart. The fear that this conjures is intense. If we don’t want to feel the fear, it may seem easier to act as though with enough control there’s another option. The only certainty in life is that if you are lucky enough to live a long life, you will eventually encounter illnesses and increasing disability. We are all going to die.
So, what is there to do with all of this? Are there lessons that homeownership can teach us about having a body or the other way around? Because it is a universal inevitability, it seems like it could be helpful to keep in mind that impermanence isn’t a moral failing. When I teach mindfulness, I often use words that I first heard from the American Buddhist teacher Vinny Ferraro, “right now, it’s like this.” This phrase is often my first step toward reorienting after I’ve gotten lost in my own suffering. When I’m believing the stories or paralyzed by the terror, I lose touch with the present moment experience.
What if, even when things fall apart, there is still a home to inhabit? If we’re willing to shift away from the idea of home as a place or house or even a person, there is a possibility of making a home in the simplicity of the present moment. Lest this sound metaphorical, I want to describe an experience I had on meditation retreat. I have always found meditation retreats exciting and invigoratingly full of potential, much the way some of my friends talk about running marathons or going back to grad school again. There was one retreat, however, that I almost didn’t attend because I was going through a hard time, and I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea for me to be alone with myself in that particular way. I was really shaky and weepy and scared as I entered the nine-day period of silence. The first day, I was aware that I needed to treat myself extra gently, and I gave myself permission to rest a little more than usual along the way. The second day I noticed that in addition to traditional walking practice, sometimes I just needed to go for a walk in the woods as mindfully as possible. When I had a check-in with the teacher midway through the retreat, I was both tearful and relieved. I said that I’d been worried about whether this was the right time for retreat, but that I kept finding that even when the emotions that arose were big, the experience of returning to the moment was the same. I didn’t have to deny my grief or fear, I could see them and name them and know them clearly without getting derailed by them because I was experiencing them only as they were in the moment. It was a revelation to discover that even amid grief and confusion, I could relate to my present experience as emotion and sensation. It was so surprising to get my bearings again and again in each new moment.
In a culture that rushes from one thing to another, multitasking and technologically distracted, it can be hard to arrive anywhere. I wonder whether home might be the place where we settle in, where we rest, and where we can arrive fully with all that our bodies and our minds carry. In this way, home becomes an action, a practice. I wonder whether home is all of the moments where we arrive between this moment and our final moment. Because bodies and houses are impermanent, what would it look like to make my belonging and my shelter more diffuse? I think I may be practicing home each time I allow myself to show up in relationships both fully and with permission to evolve. I am practicing home when I make myself a source of encouragement and safety for others to do the same. I am practicing home when I resist the cultural pressure to judge or shame my body as it ages, and I’m practicing home when I arrive enough to listen to what my body is telling me.
Whether it’s the house home or the body home, the emotional resonance of home contains the basic and universal desire for safety. May I be safe. May you be safe. May all beings be safe. If there is no safety from impermanence or the losses baked into the human experience, what do we have instead? I’m very open to the answers that arrive for others, but for me, what’s left is care and practice.