I longed to get away. I yearned to get in the car and drive up into the Adirondacks or maybe the Berkshires. I wasn’t longing for a particular destination—some little town with a view of the mountains that was good for walking around—I was seeking myself. I told people that I felt the poignancy of summer slipping away.
But really what I was feeling was grief at the way my life was passing seemingly without me. I ached to pull myself out of the river of time. I wanted to go somewhere and remember that I was alive. I once confessed this to one of my first spiritual teachers.
“I don’t understand vacations,” this teacher said, speaking in a slow, deliberate way. “Why do people want to vacate themselves?”
Did I want to be vacant? No, I wanted to be fully inhabited! I was young and new to spiritual practice but I was very determined. I vowed to let go of distractions and uproot unwholesome impulses so that I could be a vessel for loving awareness. Did she not see this in me?
This woman looked at me impassively. She was very tall and looked down on me. I wondered if she was studying me with an impartial attention that was the result of years of meditation and inner work. I didn’t find this teacher in the way I had read about in books—after a long search filled with trials and tests. She was an elder in an organization dedicated to the spiritual teachings I looked to for guidance.
It made my heart twist, imagining how I might appear to her. I thought of pictures I had seen of crowds of tourists swarming European cities and national parks. Glimpsed from above, we humans often look like an infestation rather than a blessing, blindly devouring and despoiling the places we touch. But weren’t at least a few in that crowd starving for contact with beauty and the natural world? Maybe they were searching for the meaning of their lives—not in words but in felt experience?
The word vacation comes from a Latin root that means to be unoccupied. This can mean fleeing the scene—seeking pleasurable distractions instead of noticing what is here. But couldn’t it also mean stopping our usual doing to experience being?
What if instead of vacationing we talked about going on holiday, the way the English do? The Old English root of that word means holy day. I proposed this to that long-ago teacher. She made no reply.
I was young and full of the stories I had read about what it was like to be in the presence of a real teacher. Wildly different in style and appearance, rough or elegant, representing a great tradition or none, these special beings shared the quality of making those who found them feel deeply heard and seen. Offering the grace of full, compassionate acceptance, they invited their students to go beyond their limiting beliefs. This was not like that at all.
Under her gaze, I thought about how I was missing the mark. In the ancient definition, it didn’t matter if an archer missed the mark by an inch or a mile—any miss was a sin. Did I think that yearning I felt to go away—to know myself in a new way in a new space—had holiness in it? This teacher went on retreats, and led them. Did the restless ache I felt relate or was it a wish to escape? I pictured expensively outfitted adventure tourists waiting in line to summit Mt. Everest, adventure tourism of all kinds—visits to shamans in jungles, to glaciers before they melted. Weren’t we all really seeking the same thing in the end—a deeper experience of being alive?
How easily my practice slipped from self-observation to self-judgment, from compassionate curiosity and contemplation to comparison. It took me years to learn to look inside myself with loving acceptance, but slowly I came to understand that the aching restlessness I felt was a guide leading me to my true home.
Is it possible to grieve for the loss of a home we have never known? There is a paradoxical urge in us to go away so that we can find our way in. At different points in our lives, triggered by different events, we are gripped with the sense that time is passing and somehow we haven’t noticed. We feel a pang of loss and know that we haven’t lived as we might have lived.
Summer turns to golden autumn or a friend moves away or someone we love dies, and suddenly we realize how quickly things change and how strange it is that we don’t notice. We have been busy doing so many things yet it is as if we have been sleeping. In such moments we know that our deepest wish is not to “live our dreams,” as the saying goes, but to wake up from them. We don’t want to be carried along passively, pulled this way and that way. We want to touch the earth. We want to inhabit our lives, to feel that we have been here, alive on the earth. We are homesick for this.
Last August, honoring that deep need to get away, I jumped in my car and drove into the Adirondack Mountains, spending a long weekend with a high-school friend near a lake I had visited as a child. Years have passed between our visits, and decades had passed since I had visited this lake. I arrived at night in a torrential downpour but even in the darkness I felt as if I was on familiar ground.
One day during the visit, we wandered through an antique store in a nearby village. My friend loved wandering down the narrow aisles, examining old toys, wooden tennis rackets, snow shoes, and signs for attractions like the “Enchanted Forest.”
“I love how these things make me remember,” she said with a smile.
Later we drove in Lake George and I told my friend I recalled being there as a child, wearing a Robin Hood hat with a feather that was purchased for me at the Enchanted Forest. Savoring her quiet happiness, I thought of an expression I once heard attributed to a great spiritual teacher: nostalgia for being.
Once it was believed that nostalgia was a disease that could actually kill you. In 1688, Johannes Hofer, a medical student living in Switzerland, published a dissertation in which he joined two Greek words, nostos, return, and algos, pain, to describe the longing that afflicted soldiers and others deployed far from home. The nostalgia that he described was no wistful longing for the things and experiences of simpler times. It was a disease that drove people to suicide or profound depression and self-neglect. The cause? Hofer theorized that it had something to do with the vibration of the animal spirits in the sufferer.
The only real cure was going home. When this wasn’t possible, for example in military settings, soldiers were punished for manifesting signs of homesickness. In civilian culture, nostalgia was treated like a mental illness, a form of melancholy (ironically, a person could be sent away for it).
Gradually, however, nostalgia began to be understood as a feeling that can be energizing or inspiring—the bittersweet happiness of remembering past times or experiences that are passed but somehow marvelously still intact in us: that mountain lake, that brand of ice cream, that hat! Our awareness of the passage of time sanctifies these objects and memories, burnishing them with the great truth of impermanence. Nostalgia for being is missing a presence that the thinking mind alone can’t know.
The world and its inhabitants give us grief, as the saying goes. We give ourselves grief. We spend our days working to survive and control a reality that stubbornly refuses to be controlled. We manage and defend ourselves, spinning and editing narratives to explain it all, criticizing or denying parts of ourselves that long for connection and love. And still, we know that we are meant for more.
“I felt in need of a great pilgrimage, so I sat still for three days,” wrote the Persian poet Hafiz.
The longing to go away, to separate ourselves from our ordinary lives and know ourselves in a larger way streams from the same grieving impulse to go inward, to meditate and pray. We want to touch the earth of our existence, to remember that we always forget in the thick of our days: we are alive. Great philosophers and sages teach us about Being, the source and end of all our journeys, beyond thought and form. We know it in our bones. We seek it when we go away to forget ourselves and find ourselves at the same time the way we can in the presence of nature or art or in the company of a good friend. Under all our strivings, we are grieving to reach the child we once were, to be safe and allowed to our true selves, to be.
The afternoon after our outing in Lake George, my friend and I sat in Adirondack chairs by the river behind the cabin. The warm sun felt good after the storm the day before. I listened to her stories about her life and her family, listening as I listened to the river, letting it roll on, responding from time to time without thinking about it—“oh, wow” or “‘how amazing” or “how sad.” But old childhood friendships are spacious.
We knew each other at fourteen years old, and so many years and life-changing events had passed between then and now—sickness and trouble with loved ones, the death of a child. The impermanence of life was a given between us.
The mark of a real friendship is safety. The Buddha was once asked by his disciple Sariputta how we can tell if a person is truly a good friend. The Buddha answered that they inspire our wholesome qualities in us. They lead us to our own wellbeing. We can be calm and grounded with them. They are generous even when it’s hard to be generous, taught the Buddha. They show up in hard times. In the presence of true friends, we can just be, not worrying about how or who. They create clearings for being.
Sitting with my friend, all I wished for was to be present, bearing witness to what she was sharing—the trips and accomplishments and indelible moments and also the grievous losses she had learned to bear.
Some scholars say that ancient Greek epics can be divided into stories about seeking glory in war (the Iliad) and stories about finding the way home (the Odyssey). I’ve come to understand that our ordinary lives—even our days—can be divided the same way. We long to go out and accomplish things (sometimes big things, sometimes the small triumph of getting up off the couch and doing the laundry). But we also ache to find our way home. We don’t necessarily seek glory in war, but we wish to be known and remembered if only by a few. And like Odysseus we ache to return to home, that place where we can be as we most deeply and truly are, no editing, no defenses, no disguises or tricks or armor.
This being human echoes creation: We yearn to go out and explore and create—and we yearn to come home again. Like the out breath and the in breath, this quest in both directions is necessary and connected. We are here to bear the ache of the ceaseless movement of life, gently, slowly learning that, like breathing, it is part of a greater whole. ◆
This piece is excerpted from the Winter 2024-2025 issue of Parabola, GRIEF & GRATITUDE. You can find the full issue on our online store.
