I found myself standing once again amidst an overflow of cardboard moving boxes and possessions, when the lay Sangha blog Dew On The Grass’s new monthly theme caught my attention: ‘The Map To Where I Live’¹. I was nearly fifty, and yet had never in my life had a permanent address; what was ‘home’ for me?

My parents loved to travel, and created the chance to do it with their work. (They had both gone from working class roots to building careers in development economics and science.) My siblings and I travelled with them. As a result I grew up moving between countries, and even continents, every few years.

Maybe this sounds like an incredible way to grow up; I don’t know. In retrospect I think I was lucky, though at the time, of course, it was all I knew. On the one hand, I was jealous of children who never moved or travelled; they seemed to have a lot more friends and confidence than I did. I felt insecure and anguished from never having the chance to attach to people and places outside of my small nuclear family. On the rare occasions that I did make a connection, I would soon be forced to leave them behind, and most likely never saw them again.

On the other hand I got to explore the world like a very small social anthropologist, living literally side-by-side with people of every age, class, and from nearly every corner of the world. I was endlessly curious about their lives, drives, ‘loves’ and ‘hates’; all the ways in which we humans are different from each other, and in which ways we are the same.

I adored where I lived aged eleven for almost three years, in Zimbabwe. This was in the 1980s after Independence when many Zimbabweans said that their country felt more safe, strong, free and full of possibility than it had before. It seemed a perfect environment for a young pre-teen.

When my parents’ work contract ended I desperately tried to stay on my own, by asking a close friend’s missionary family to adopt me. My parents were understandably not willing to let me go however, and I braced myself for another repeat of what I thought of as grey and angst-ridden Swedish suburbia. Sweden was my family’s ‘default country’: most of us had been born there, and our passports and my father’s work HQ were based there.

A year or so later, my family was set to move to Indonesia on a new work contract. But at the last minute when we were already on our way, the contract fell through. I’d already been enrolled in school but my parents had to work elsewhere, and I ended up living on my own in Jakarta aged only fifteen.

Living alone so young, not only for the first time but also in a completely new culture, came as a shock. Just as I had done in Zimbabwe, though, I fell in love with the country, the school, my new friends and adventures. At the end of the school year, again I was not able to find a way to stay, and again I was told to return to Swedish suburbia; where I despondently stumbled my way through the remaining years of secondary school.

By the time I graduated I felt exhausted, lonely, and out of sync with my peers. I was eighteen but had already struggled to live on my own for three years, as well as having attended nine schools, in four education systems, on three continents. I hadn’t even begun my adult life; but I knew down to my bones what love and loss were.

Looking back I can count how by that time, I had loved and lost four times. Not in the romantic or familial sense that people usually mean when they use that phrase; rather I had lost the sense of somewhere to call ‘home’: somewhere to belong; familiarities that I’d slowly built, with continuity of friendships, interests, and relative safety. A comfortable-enough place to eat dinner at night, and to sleep. Somewhere to be happy, or comforted when I was sad.

Humans tend to naturally and mostly unconsciously build attachments to the place where they find themselves. As a toddler, I naturally attached to wherever I lived. As a teen, however, I found far greater belonging and joy in Zimbabwe and Indonesia, than in what others called my home country. I realised that to some extent, we can make changes and choices that influence where (and who) we attach to. It is complicated of course; but we are not necessarily obliged to live with our existing attachments, especially if they don’t hold a sense of safety, joy, or connection for us.

I moved to London to study at university, reasoning that a degree in Development Studies² would allow me to work in the places that I loved. Unfortunately I learned that engineering would have been far more useful, and I was not an engineer. Nor was I cut out for the other jobs in demand where I wanted to live—English teaching, business, medicine, politics, and missionary work. I was drawn to psychology, the arts, and journalism. With the exception of war reporting, these careers typically required years of slow growth: building a work portfolio in a small hometown as my parents had done, and then maybe by your 40s working your way ‘up and out’: towards promotions and expertise that afford you more choices for where to live, if you can and wish.

I tried it. I wanted so badly the traditional and sensible approach to work. But by the age of 29, despite my best attempts, I was no closer to the sense of connection that I yearned for. Instead I had battled recurring clinical depression to the point of suicidal ideation. I felt unable to bear any longer the shadow of alienation that followed me around, and yearned for a place—any place—that felt like home.

With a sense of urgency, I tried turning the puzzle the other way around. ‘Maybe I should save up and move to somewhere I love first’, I wondered, ‘and THEN try to find a local job once I’m there.’ It was risky; I would have to leave behind my job, friends, fiancé, and the house he’d bought (that I had never felt at home in). My life was in my hands, though; I felt that I had no choice.

For almost a whole joyful and adventurous year, I found work as a magazine and newspaper columnist in Thailand—another country that I had always felt a natural resonance with. Because of my lack of relevant work experience however, I was not able to secure a long-term work and residence permit. I had to return to the UK, and ended up living for the next eleven years in the same situation as perhaps most: in a good-enough place that would have me, doing good-enough work when I could get it.

As a Zen Buddhist I kept trying to be wholeheartedly present and to do my best: to practise zazen; to accept wherever I already found myself; to in a sense ‘choose’ my situation, even though it seemed more as if the situation had chosen me. For some time, I succeeded at fooling myself into believing that I had attained a state of wholehearted acceptance. But an uneasy resentment simmered below the surface. I could not force my heart into acceptance, any more than I could ‘push an elephant through the eye of a needle’³.

Depression kept showing up at my door, an old ghost that I could not fight. My teacher at Throssel said ‘Ok. If it’s depression showing up—then accept depression.’ While I had studied Buddhist practice, this idea was so counter-intuitive and yet deceptively simple that I had not thought of it. Practising it during zazen immediately gave me a welcome relief from the pain; until I got used to it and the relief levelled off, an underlying anguish returning again. I practised and practised, but no matter how many layers it felt like I sloughed off—no matter how many ‘breakthroughs’ it felt like I had—there the pain and anguish still were. I seemed to be made of the stuff.

As many in the Sangha have asked before me, ‘How long? How much longer of this?’ A question which of course cannot be answered. I found just enough faith to keep going by observing monks who had gone through the same thing, and who appeared to have emerged on another more peaceful shore. I would like to say to them, and to everyone who keeps going no matter what: thank you for saving my life. This is the Sangha Treasure.

At times the practitioner will not feel as if she has any faith, and those whom I know (myself included) would snort with laughter at the suggestion that they are setting any kind of example. The thing is that sometimes the best we can do, is to do nothing more than stay alive for just one more day. The pain of that for some of us takes as much if not more strength and courage, as any of the heroic acts in the history books.

I kept going in this way, until one ordinary day—when it appeared that everything around me had quietly but radically changed. I felt like a full-grown butterfly looking with surprise back at the discarded tatters of a cocoon. Was that really me? Sometimes change is simultaneously seismic and gentle. Nothing (and yet everything) had changed. I might as well have been flung into a parallel galaxy or been taken over by an alien life form, for all the familiarity that my daily habits still held.

The surface remained the exact same as before: I had the same name, address, and appearance in the mirror; the same flat that I struggled to pay the rent for; the same cheap-but-nice throw pillows that I had treated myself to, the old desk, the kitchen utensils. But somehow, all these things and identifiers had become void of the personal significance that they had previously held. They no longer felt familiar; I could no longer take them for granted. At the same time I could see that at their core, along with all other things—somehow beyond material form—my life, and all the people and things in it, had transformed into treasures: precious beyond doubt.

I hadn’t taken drugs. By which circuitous route then, I wondered, had I arrived in this brand new place? Maybe it was pure chance. Or maybe everything we do, even if it is only to stay alive another day, adds up; even as we despair that our efforts and existence do not seem worthwhile. I had not been successful at choosing the big life-changing things like work, home and family, so I had resigned myself to chipping away at doing my best in the tiny and apparently insignificant day-to-day choices that I did have: my thoughts, words and actions, as they are taught in the Precepts. I don’t hold proof of cause and effect; all I know is that one day, without my doing anything differently, life had completely and irrevocably changed.

The phrase that sparked this essay was ‘The Map To Where I Live’. Like a nurse seeking a vein from which to tap blood, I had spent my life seeking a map that would lead me to the river of life itself. A few times I had been lucky to fall into that river, finding myself fully and happily submerged. Equally randomly though, I’d been flung out into unforgiving desert. I spent years feeling lost and trying to trace my way back. The trouble is, that there is no way back. If there’s anything, it is not a linear path so much as a spiral: a gradual upward climb as if towards a sun.

And yet what I saw on that ’new’ day, was not exactly new. If you’re climbing a mountain and the vegetation gradually changes, there will still be a singular moment in which you notice that everything changed. Looking back, I see now how familiar challenges return again and again in other forms; harder or softer than before. And as long as the challenges don’t kill us, the best we can do is to keep trying. Within this work, imperceptibly, is something akin to progress; which is the opposite of the way back. If the shape of life is a spiral, even the smallest and most insignificant effort leads home: to the place that I’d been trying so hard to return to, this whole time. ‘Home’ for me was not a place on a map after all, but a state of heart over time.

Notes

1. A short version of this essay was first published on https://dewonthegrass.net (May 2022).
2. An interdisciplinary social science focussed on the alleviation of poverty.
3. The metaphor of an elephant being pushed through the eye of a needle occurs in the Talmud (Berakhot 55b; Baba Metzia 38b).