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Time to wrestle with the seeds of my own insecurities, rooted as they often are in hypocrisy. That sounds a little harsh, I suppose, coming from me who is such a big fan of myself, but sometimes the truth hurts. Not in a sucking chest wound kind of a way, but more the lemon juice in a paper cut kind of way.
I get sad and anxious when people I know go away. I wonder what it is that I could or might have done to make them flee. I used to fret over my father's departure to work, and rejoiced in his return every evening. I could not understand why anyone would want to leave home to find happiness. Wasn't that the whole idea of having a home in the first place? That's where your heart is after all, why would you want to go traipsing about the globe without one of your most important internal organs?
Well, it seems that your heart really does stay in your chest, and that home thing is really a giant battery that serves to keep it charged. You can travel for many miles on a full charge, and it's quite possible that on your journey you will find dozens of other charging stations, some of them more dependable than others.
Have I lived for years in fear that I wouldn't be able to make it to that next charging station? You bet I have. I have resented those who have taken on faith their own reserves and set out on grand adventures of their own. As it turns out, my own arm of the spiral galaxy dragged me to the edge of the continent on which I was born. Circumstances have forced me to surf the waves of uncertainty when it comes to jobs and houses and cars. Every one of those choices moved me in some small way from the galactic central point. Someday all matter will compress back in to that point, and we will start again. For now I will be as amazed and impressed when I encounter beings from other parts of my life, much in the way we all marvel at the notion of extraterrestrials. Only now I find myself, as often as not, the one who is flying back to my home world with news from across the void. I will have to work on this model and try to understand its vague complexity until I can come up with another metaphor.