Going Home

I'm taking a literature class this semester that focuses on the works and philosophy of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. One of our readings was really rewarding. It had to do with 'homecoming' and 'homesteading'. I know these don't seem like really deep topics, but there was something that I understood after struggling through those pages of philosophy.

Homecoming involves exactly what it implies. It means coming back to where you once were, usually to where you grew up or claim as home. You have this 'home' preserved as an idea. It is a time and place that you claim.

Homesteading is easy to interpret too. I means that you arrive at a new place. You set up shop, try to fit in, and start a new chapter of life.

The interesting thing about 'going home' is that it exists in your mind. You've created it. You can never really go back home. Also, it is important in many ways not to go back home. Because it is more of a mindset and not a place, you will find yourself adopting attitudes and roles that you previously held as a way of trying to fit back in at home.

That brings me to homesteading. You see, going home necessarily implies homesteading. Since you can never really go back, and since things never can stay the same, you necessary come back to homestead. Homesteading is a projection of that idealized notion of 'home' onto a new chapter in life in a new place. This is why going home when things have necessarily changed is not the escape that you might think it would be because you will project your notion of what 'home' is onto what cannot be home any longer.

Its an interesting bit a psychology, to be sure. Its also healthy to realize that we all have these tendencies to want to go back home.

We can never go home. We can never get back to the way things once were. Its doubtful that things ever existed according to our idealized notion to begin with. Any attempt to do so, therefore, is a misguided attempt, and attempt to escape our current reality for one that we have set up as 'home'. Change and acceptance are necessary for progress.

I think that a person that lives with the idealized notion of 'home' or what it needs to be will find himself comparing it to reality and wondering why he cannot ever reach his ideal. Despondency may result. Instead, I recommend that each individual seek for self-mastery and improvement. You will never need to escape, to 'go back home', if you are looking to the future and goal-oriented.

Of course, this by no means that I never have wanted to 'go back home'. I think it has something to our natural 'fight and flight' psychological and physiological mechanisms. When the fight gets tough, we may want to take flight home.

In a spiritual light, life isn't just about getting back home, waiting-out mortality, and then living in peace for eternity. Its not necessarily always directly about the fight, although we all participate in the confrontation between good and evil by virtue of our existence. I think it has to do with homesteading. We have come to this place and time, assumed an identity based on our individual socialization processes, and try to put down roots somewhere. Just remember that we are pilgrims, travelers, building a home. The great thing about our pilgrimage, our mortal sojourn, is that Christ directs us on how to build a home, His kingdom. I don't simply mean that we can be satisfied by Church service. I mean that His Plan is to build His kingdom in each one of us. This correct version of what 'home' is will lead us to correct choices with regards to our families and lives in addition to peace of mind.

This vision is the vision of Zion. We don't try to go back to Zion, do we? No; Zion is something that is to be forged. Don't escape the world by going to Church or the Temple. Don't go home! Go forward! You can only go forward. Escape is an illusion.

I have no idea who I'm writing to - maybe just to myself.

This happens occasionally - I get on my soapbox and just keep going with an idea.  Let me know what you think.