Coming Home to Ourselves
Last week, I wrote about our country coming home to itself. This week, I want to try and step away from the breaking news cycle for a moment and write about something just as urgent: coming home to ourselves.
Right now, the world feels really loud, noisy, and unpredictable. The Olympics began in Italy on Friday. The Super Bowl is today and will draw many of us together to watch. You can feel the excitement and energy in the air, but you can also feel what comes along with big events like these. Streets close down. Helicopters fly overhead. Barriers get built. And police officers assemble across neighborhoods to prepare for crowds and safety.
We are, in fact, living at a time when enormous energy is poured into what is happening outside of us. Events. Venues. Streets. Public spaces. And yet, so many of us are struggling with what is happening inside of us.
The news cycle feels relentless. It continues to sow disbelief, fear, shock, and outrage hour after hour, headline after headline. It leaves many of us feeling anxious, unsettled, and ungrounded.
This week, the news that my friend and colleague Savannah Guthrie’s 84-year-old mother was abducted from her home sparked countless conversations with people I know who also have a parent living alone. Our parents are targets now, more than a few people said to me in disbelief. “What is happening to us?” they asked through tears. “What are we supposed to do?”
Journalists and journalism are under fire and attack. The Washington Post, once one of the world’s most respected news organizations, just fired hundreds of journalists, calling the future of the publication into question.
“There’s no question you can produce a world-class news report with fewer people. But the how and why matter. What’s the strategy?” says former Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli, who also served as managing editor at The Wall Street Journal. “The Post occupies a singular place in American journalism. It needs visionary and independent stewardship that is equal to its journalism, worthy of its promise, and necessary to meet this important moment in history.”
How do we navigate all of this disruption? How do we remain hopeful and grounded?
I believe we are being called to come home to within. Home to what grounds us in our bodies, our hearts, our faith, and our deepest knowing. We’re being called to get in touch with our own inner knowing at a time when the outside world feels shaky. That’s why I’m grateful for the writers using their voices to help us stay grounded here today, including Coach Leza Danly, who offers her advice for staying grounded in the face of uncertainty, and Dr. Lucy McBride, who advises on how we can find credentialed experts to help us stay well at a time when it’s so hard to know who to trust.
I’m also grateful to this community because you’re always on the lookout for what inspires you, what restores you, and what reminds you that millions of people care deeply and refuse to surrender to darkness.
Last week, many of you wrote to me about the Buddhist monks’ “Walk for Peace.” After I learned more about it, I came away feeling calmer. More grounded. More hopeful.
The walk has several intentions. One of them is to remind people that peace already lives within each of our hearts and our minds. And yet, so many of us keep that peace locked away in a box, unsure how to reach it.
The monks say they hope to help give people the key. They teach that to access our own peace, we must practice loving kindness, compassion, hope, and unity. "But how do we do that?" someone asked them. "How do we actually live that?"
Their answer was simple.
We practice.
One of the practices they offer is an affirmation: Today will be my peaceful day.
They suggest repeating it again and again, walking in silence, slowing down, practicing mindfulness, and being intentional about where we are and what we are doing.
The monks are walking to Washington, DC, with a request for Congress to recognize Vesak, the full moon day in May that marks the birth of Siddhartha Gautama, his enlightenment, and his passing, as a federal holiday. But I did not get the sense that they are overly focused on whether Congress ultimately does what they are hoping for.
What they seem focused on is how they walk. How they show up. How they treat one another. How awake, aware, and intentional they remain along the way. They are deeply grounded in their faith, their beliefs, and their own awakening. I love that.
Because as I watched police officers gathering in streets this week as part of the build-up to global games and national spectacle, I kept thinking about how much attention we give to creating safety and order in the outer world, and how little attention many of us give to creating safety and steadiness inside ourselves.
I also watched three men this week in three very different public moments.
In one, I watched the president berate a female reporter in a way that felt harsh and deeply personal. Then in another, I watched him post demeaning racist content online during Black History Month and refused to apologize for it.
Meanwhile this week, I watched Renee Good’s two brothers testify on Capitol Hill about their sister. Through tears, they spoke to Congress about who she was in the world, about how they had hoped her death might create meaningful change, and about their heartbreak that it had not.
Three men. Three public stages. Two very different ways of using voice, power, and presence.
This served as a reminder to me that coming home to ourselves is not something we do only in private. We come home in public, too.
We come home in the way we speak. In the way we listen. In the way we hold another person’s dignity when we have a microphone, a title, a platform, or a moment of power.
Coming home means remembering who we are—even when we are tired, even when we are angry, even when the spotlight is on us. Especially then.
I believe that coming home to your own knowing—your own sense of what truly matters and what is worth walking for—is critical right now. I also believe we are in the midst of a great awakening as individuals, as families, and as a country.
The question remains: how do we meet this moment personally, professionally, and publicly?
We meet it by reserving time to focus on what truly matters. By focusing on our missions, our purposes, and our values. By learning again how to care for ourselves and for one another.
There is no doubt we are living in uncertain times. And research shows that when everything feels uncertain, the way forward is to return to what forms the foundation of our lives.
Love.
Care.
Compassion.
Mission.
Family.
Friendship.
Faith.
So as the world turns its eyes this weekend to stadiums, ceremonies, crowds, and scoreboards, perhaps the quiet invitation for each of us is this: Come home.
Come home to your breath.
Come home to your bodies.
Come home to your values.
Come home to the way you choose to speak, to listen, and to love.
Come home to yourself in private and in public. Look at the ground under your feet and the sky over your head, our larger collective home. Then think about the home within you.
Today, let us decide to begin again from the inside out.
Come home.
It is from there that we can move forward and be the light our world so desperately needs.
Prayer of the Week
Dear God,
May we come home to what is true within us. May we be grounded in love, steady in compassion, awake to our purpose, and willing to carry that light into the world
Amen.
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