This time of year has a strong gravitational pull toward home.

Going home for the holidays. Decorating our homes. Traveling to other people’s homes. Remembering former homes — childhood ones, family ones, ones that now live mostly in memory. It can be cozy…and complicated.

Growing up, we had a different physical home almost every year. New address, new walls, new neighborhood. And yet, somehow, home traveled with us. The same holiday decorations. The same foods. The same rhythm — church, gifts, certain songs, certain shows on TV. Traditions became our continuity. They made home portable.

Over time, I began to understand home differently.

When I first started practicing mindfulness, I often imagined my body as a house. As I got still, I’d wander and breathe through different “rooms.” Often my breath was like a breeze coming in from an open window. Sometimes I stayed put, enjoying the comfort of a room I knew well, sometimes I ventured into less-travelled places.

That image has stayed with me.

Mindfulness, I’ve learned, is a way of coming home — to the body, to the present moment, to ourselves. And the pause is what makes that possible.

Not the pause as stopping everything.
But the pause as arriving.

I feel that arrival especially this time of year — in the soft glow of white lights on the tree, in the sound of bells on the door, in Vince Guaraldi’s Christmas Time is Here drifting through the room. In memories of my grandmother’s amazing cookies. All a quiet welcoming to arrive in the amalgamation of what’s past, here now, and still to come.

As this year is turning into next, perhaps the invitation isn’t to rush toward resolutions or accomplishments, but to pause long enough to come home — and let renewal arise from there.

Here’s to your finding the pause that brings you home — and the joy of arriving there.