15/10/2026
There is a well-known story from Zen circles, often told by Thích Nhất Hạnh. A man is riding a horse that is galloping very quickly. He appears to be going somewhere important. Someone standing alongside the road calls out, “Where are you going?” And the rider answers, “I don’t know! Ask the horse!”
Thích Nhất Hạnh says that the horse is our habit energy—the patterns that carry us along, often without our even realizing it.
I don’t know about you, but I often find myself in exactly this situation. I can be moving with great concentration and commitment, yet something other than me is directing my life. Something else is in the driver’s seat.
Cole Arthur Riley once said, “If you are not in your body, someone else is.” Our absence does not leave behind an empty space. When we are not present in our bodies and not truly inhabiting our lives, that space is quickly occupied by something else: capitalism, technology, the expectations of others, the pressure to produce, or all the inherited patterns that tell us who we should be and how fast we should be moving.
Henri Nouwen named the spiritual cost of this very clearly when he wrote, “Most of us have an address but cannot be found there.”
We may have an address. We may have a body. We may have a life that appears to be ours. But are we actually there?
Perhaps the spiritual life begins with a return to ourselves. We have to come back to our own lives because we can only meet God there—not in some imagined life somewhere else. We can only truly live, pray, love
and do what is ours to do when we are truly present. Otherwise, we become spectators of our own existence, leaving our bodies, our psyches, and perhaps even our souls behind while the horse keeps galloping.
So today, maybe we can begin simply by coming home to our bodies: becoming mindful of and grateful for our feet touching the ground, our hands, our beating hearts, the breath moving in and out of us, the gift of seeing and beholding, the astonishing gift of being alive.
Home, of course, can be a complicated word. I know that it is for me as an immigrant. I have sometimes wondered whether this country can ever truly be home because I was not born here. There have also been moments when others have made it clear that they did not consider it my home—that, in their eyes, I did not fully belong.
And yet, when I return to the country where I was born, I know that it is no longer entirely home either. I belong there, but I have also been changed by leaving. I belong here, but not without questions. Perhaps many people live with this strange experience of never feeling fully at home anywhere: some no longer feel at home in the places where they once belonged, while others have never experienced a place where they truly belonged.
Maybe this is why the language of spiritual homecoming speaks to me so deeply. It reminds me that beneath all the questions of where I belong, there is a home I carry within me: the place where my life is actually being lived, where my breath is breathing, where God is already present and holding me with care, and where I can hear again the voice that says, “You are my Beloved.”
Shared from Adam Bucko on Thich Nhat Hanh Quotes fb page
