Our Eternal Home

Give a baby a washbasin and there is no limit to what it can be; the baby is bound by nothing. One moment it is a drum to bang, the next a hat to wear; then it becomes a wheel to roll, or a vehicle to sit in, and so it goes on without a pause.

Everything is like this for a baby. Having no words, it lives by pure experience and never interprets anything. It simply laughs, and simply cries.

Utterly powerless, and yet, in a sense, both the weakest and the strongest of beings! The innocent power with which it bends its mother to its will is beyond human understanding, and far beyond anything even her beloved husband can manage.

It has no past and no future, and so nothing to regret and nothing to fear. It makes no distinction between itself and others; it has no sense of a self at all.

The baby lives in this paradise of selflessness. Each of us has a home somewhere in space, each in a different place, but the baby is the one home that all of humanity shares: a home in time.

Think, for instance, of elderly people who have lived for years in the family home with a son and his wife, yet who, as dusk falls, protest like fretful children, “This isn’t my house. I’m going home now!” This is what is called sundowning. Perhaps the place they truly long to return to, and the ultimate destination we ourselves seek when we travel, is not somewhere we can actually go, but that home in time where the baby lives, that paradise. And so, wherever we may be, if only we could see as a baby sees and feel as a baby feels, that very place would become our eternal home, the home all humanity shares: familiar and yet unknown, wrapped in love and joy.