Home Is Where My Heart Finds Peace: If I Only Find Myself When I Leave Home for the Park, Is the Park My Real Home?

I. Where This Heart Is at Peace

Someone online wrote:

Only when I leave home and go to the park do I find my true self and break free of so many distracting thoughts and attachments.

Then is that home still my home? It is a predicament.

Often, I do not even need to go to the park. When I walk downstairs, the brilliant sunshine falls on me, and I look up at the blue sky and white clouds, so many of the troubles I had at home suddenly disappear.

When is your house, your home, truly your home?

Of course, one way I am luckier than many people is that at least once I get to the park, I can find my true, peaceful self.

Many people have to escape somewhere far away before they can find it.

Most people can find themselves at some moment amid this constant escaping and shifting from one setting to another.

Su Shi’s line, “Where this heart is at peace is my homeland,” truly captures the truth of spiritual practice. An unsettled heart gives rise to myriad demons; a peaceful heart gives rise to myriad ways.

II. The Contradictions of Computers, Phones, and Self-Media

At home, I have to face my computer, and the computer is a contradiction: it is both work and leisure; both mindfulness and distraction; both a means of organizing information and a means of absorbing information chaotically. I have to face my phone, and the phone is also a contradiction: it is both social connection and loneliness, wounds from social interaction; both privacy and intrusion, work.

With contemporary ways of working, home and work become mixed together after working hours, and work intrudes into private life.

For those who work in self-media, self-media is both distraction and mindfulness; both work and entertainment. They are both authors and audience members. Sometimes people cannot distinguish the boundaries between distracting thoughts, reflection, articles, copy, and creative works.

This era places greater demands on people to balance work and rest and maintain a high level of awareness. See the earlier article “On Combining Labor and Servitude.”