Towards a Habitable Consciousness

Looking for Home While Living in It

Although I currently live at home — that is to say, I moved back in with my parents after graduating college — the feeling dawns on me, each day a sliver more like the progression of a waning moon, that I’ve been duped into a grave misunderstanding of what, and where, ‘home’ is.

Sitting at my parents’ breakfast table, I often wonder if there’s something more going on here, existentially. If this morning, while eating my granola cereal, there wasn’t some sublimity cached in those oats that gave me the slip. I looked for it. With each gnashing of my teeth, I inquired into the taste of the granola. I did my best to notice the tumbling textures in my mouth, the emotional response to flavors, the movement of consciousness. This is mindfulness, right? The 21st century’s great panacea for anxiety. It worked for Buddha. He found, by staring into the back of his eyelids, the unchanging reality Hindu’s call Brahman.

No matter how slowly I chewed, the only unchanging reality I felt myself a part of was that of a 24-year-old college graduate still living at home, eating granola in his mother’s kitchen. Living at home after graduating leaves one with the vague feeling of being left off the guest list for an exclusive party. As if life is always happening elsewhere, and you’re left stranded…