Changing, we rest

I used to dread coming home. Whether from across town or across the world, coming home meant packing bags, saying goodbye, and returning to the doldrums of everyday life. Ultimate happiness, then, for most of my youth, meant someday transforming myself into a kind of dysfunctional boomerang that, when hurled out, would leave but never return.

In literary terms, I suppose I wanted to view life more as a thread of run-on sentences—punctuated by the occasional ellipsis—than a series of declarations forced to end in a period.

As I’ve gotten older, though, I’ve come to appreciate the end of my journeys as much as I do their beginning. For me, coming home represents making connections more than it does severing ties, since I now see in my own culture traces of the warmth and generosity I have found in others. I now see reflected in those who are close to me the faces of those who are far away. In other words, the places I have been in the past and wherever I am in the present, and maybe even the places I will go in the future, are already connected.

I suppose that with age I am beginning to discover, not unlike the Beat poets, that happiness can be found along the contours of the globe as well as the ground beneath my feet, and that ultimate happiness has less to do with a beginning without an end than realizing that “beginning” and “end” are actually the same phenomenon.

Maybe this is more than just a Bildungsromane, though, and my change of heart represents some kind of deeper, philosophical message. Since the time of Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher, Western thought has understood change to be the central, organizing force of the universe. Simply, there is no other constant in life than change itself, no other guiding principle than reason.

At the same time, Zen Buddhism instructs us to find peace amid this chaos by accepting the inevitability of change and seeking enlightenment not through external prompts, but rather mindful introspection.

As I reflect on all of the journeys that have given my life meaning—all the jumps I have made in this game of hopscotch—it becomes clear that without an end to each beginning and a beginning to each end change would never be possible. And, no matter how significant or insignificant the changes in our lives may be, it is only in giving ourselves over to this force that we will ever come to find happiness, confirming that only by changing can we ever really rest.