I Want To Go Home

"Wonder" and a longing for something you have no words for

When Obi-Wan Kenobi sought out Darth Vader aboard the Death Star for their final duel in the original 1977 Star Wars film, he had a plan to overcome his former apprentice and become the guide Luke Skywalker would need in order to become a Jedi.

He would die. Without struggle or resistance, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Jedi Master and survivor of the Clone Wars, would raise his weapon up and allow Darth Vader to land a killing blow. Vader wasted no time and swung his crimson lightsaber directly into Kenobi’s midsection. It should have severed the old man in two. Of course, it didn’t.

Kenobi vanished into thin air. With his eyes shut like a man deep in prayer or meditation, Obi-Wan died. His lightsaber and heavy brown cloak hit the floor, his body nowhere to be found. Darth Vader inspected the remains, seemingly confused himself. His old master was defeated. But before Obi-Wan surrendered himself, he had said something important.

“If you strike me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.”

Obi-Wan crossed over. Into a void he entered without a hint of fear, and we’ll never know what it felt like, that is, unless we’re to make the journey one day ourselves.

There is something magical happening here.

Surely you’ve felt it once or twice.

At the heart of the world’s most well-known spiritual traditions lies a single claim that allows Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, and Christians to share a proverbial handshake in opposition to materialism. That claim has to do with an island, far out to sea and buried within the heart of each man and woman on this planet. There is a pain here—a curiosity and a longing.

We aren’t home. Like E.T. stranded on Earth with his finger stretched out toward the sky in the same way Michelangelo's Creation of Adam painting depicts the slightly curled finger of humankind reaching toward his Creator, we want to go home. This is just the opening chapter, prequel, and prologue.

When C.S. Lewis was growing up in Northern Ireland, he often found himself stuck inside his home on the outskirts of Belfast due to the consistent rain and mist that makes the Irish countryside so wonderfully alive. The hills far off in the distance became symbols of longing, a place he wanted to go but could not quite say why, with the limited vocabulary of a child.

Time, reading, and reflection would give him the words.

Something funny about language is that by its very nature, it sets boundaries on what we can express. A feeling can tear at us night and day, drawing forth joy and pain, but have no name.

English is renowned for its lexical gaps, which require the speaker to string together multiple words or sentences to convey a complex idea or sentiment. The Swedes have "Lagom" to describe the golden mean and balance between excess and scarcity, with a touch of satisfaction. The Finns speak of "Sisu", which in one word takes "grit" and adds the character of moral courage or your spiritual tank being full. It goes beyond endurance of discomfort to describe the source of one's strength as well.

Lewis seized upon a German word, “Sehnsucht,” to capture the feeling he had about the distant emerald hillside. Lewis attributed the spiritual vacuum filled by this word to a Joseph von Eichendorff poem, Blue Flower.

I am seeking the blue flower,

I seek and never find it,

My dream is that in the flower

My good fortune blooms for me.

The poem isn’t one of despair. The speaker didn’t lose their beloved family dog in the countryside. It’s deeper than a treasure hunt for gold, which would bring fortune. To search far and wide across a country for a flower evokes a need detached from worldly concerns. The flower can’t do anything for you. It won’t pay your bills or feed your family. It’s magnetic, a kind of gravity, it’s homesickness, but what even is homesickness?

This is where ‘sehnsucht’ has come to mean a “wistful, soft, tearful longing”. You can almost imagine someone with a tear on their cheek and a gentle smile as the sky erupts into the glorious pink-orange palette of a sunset.

Think Luke Skywalker watching the twin suns of Tatooine go down over his home, a place he loves but wishes to go far beyond. Something else is calling to him beyond those suns. In the 1999 Oscar-winning drama, American Beauty, Ricky Fitts gently weeps as he reviews handycam footage of a stray plastic bag dancing in the breeze. It fills Ricky with a sense that his deepest intuitions are true, that there is something magical about this life that his disappointing home life doesn’t satisfy. Wonder.

“The center of me is always and eternally in a terrible pain, searching for something beyond what the world contains,” wrote Bertrand Russell, a famed British atheist intellectual and mathematician in the early 20th century, “God, I don’t find it, but the love of it is my life.”

Russell didn’t believe in God, but he wanted to, and that feeling was a point of both pain and confusion —and yet, still, beauty. The love of his life was the tug on his spirit that Lewis identified as the “Blue Flower”, calling him toward the hillside to wander and wonder.

When the Stoics speak of the external life happening beyond the walls of our bodies, a frustration is baked into the rhetoric of men like Marcus Aurelius. In Meditations, he writes, “As if you were dying right now, despise your flesh. A mess of blood, pieces of bone, a woven tangle of nerves, veins, arteries.” Part of the Stoic ethos was to call things what they are, so that one could transcend attachments to things that masquerade as more important than they actually are.

Your wine is “just crushed up grapes and their juice”, your purple robe is not “purple”, it’s the “hair of a sheep soaked in shellfish blood.”

There’s truth to this. It’s part of what Yoda was trying to tell Luke Skywalker during his Jedi training on Dagobah when he said, “Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter,” whilst poking at Luke’s flesh with his walking stick.

Your body is only a vessel. It’s half the story, maybe less. Yoda’s “crude matter” is Aurelius’s “mess of blood, pieces of bone”.

Our bodies matter, but only in so much as they support the quest for the Blue Flower, which, in case you’re lost, is not tucked away in the hills or growing on an island. It’s inside of you. Epictetus, a philosopher with genuine physical challenges when it came to walking upright, said that “Sickness may challenge your body, but are you merely your body? Lameness may impede your legs, but are you merely your legs?”

What’s funny about how Obi-Wan Kenobi left the physical world in Star Wars is that the Jedi Order had very specifically rejected the notion of life after death. When Yoda was visited by the Force “ghost” of the slain Qui-Gon Jinn during the Clone Wars, he believed he’d lost his mind. Upon hearing of this from Yoda, the rest of the Jedi Council believed so as well, and ran tests on Yoda as if they were neuroscientists rather than the mystical space monks we understand Jedi to be.

Kenobi, Qui-Gon, Yoda, and eventually Anakin and Luke Skywalker were first of their kind voyagers to another plane of existence. Indeed, there was an island out there all along that expressed a deeper reality than our often-painful lives on the mainland.

Lewis would add color to this truth with The Chronicles of Narnia, often misunderstood by passersby as a story about a fantasyland inside a wardrobe. His claim was different. It was that you, the reader, like the Pevensie children, Peter, Lucy, Susan, and Edmund, are living on the wrong side of the wardrobe door. Truth is in Narnia, not London, New York, Paris, or Miami.

That is scary to some people.

It’s okay.

What we’re up against is a life in which nothing satisfies for long. The pleasures of food, drink, romance, wealth, and status always wind up leaving us hungry. It’s a hamster wheel of longing that no living human being has gone without. Thirst. Is there a river, an ocean, or any kind of water that will take it away and leave us feeling whole?

It seems not. Lewis, in his special way as a writer and poet, categorized all of this as the meaning of joy. Tearful. Soft. Wistful. To want is to live. But as he would conclude, “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.”

On Geeky Stoics, we talk a lot about Qui-Gon Jinn’s maxim, “Your focus determines your reality.” It’s one of our thematic pillars, followed by Balance. Both of these are Stoic principles, and honestly, that of many other worthwhile philosophies. They are good, but not the ultimate good.

The entire purpose of developing focus in your life is to play an active role in the shape of your own reality. If you are unable to wear the prescription lenses of your choice, made to fit your unique nature and help you see in full color, you’ll never be able to make out that fuzzy shape on the horizon of the sea. Life will be dancing shapes on the wall, mere shadow puppets without explanation or context.

When you’ve found the glasses that allow you to see and move through this world with confidence and clarity, it can almost be overwhelming. Perhaps you’ve seen viral videos of colorblind people having full sight restored, or hearing aids that help the deaf to hear music. Their faces stretch, eyes widen, and they fill with tears as their senses realize all they’ve been missing and imagining about this thing called sound and color.

We need balance in our lives so as not to be overwhelmed by the full range of feelings that aim to swamp our ship as we head toward the misted island.

The purpose is not to be maximally productive, economically efficient, or to create shareholder value. Those things can be good for living a comfortable life, but in the end, it’s all the “crude matter” Yoda spoke of, and something less real than what Lewis put inside the wardrobe doors.

Wonder, the patiently waiting life of spring beneath the winter snow, that’s why you’re here. To feel what Luke Skywalker, Bertrand Russell, Ricky Fitts, Yoda, and C.S. Lewis felt, that there is something unnamed and beautiful hiding in plain sight, something that simply—is, that’s when you’re most alive.