When I got out of my car, the air was pulsing. The whole place was absolutely silent, but the silence wasn't an absence of noise. It was really a presence of a kind of energy or quickening. And at my feet was the great, still blue plate of the Pacific Ocean. All around me were 800 acres of wild dry brush, and 1,200 feet of golden pampas grass running down to the sea.

And the next day, when I woke up in the absence of telephones and TVs and laptops, the days seemed tostretch for a thousand hours. It was really all the freedom I know when I'm traveling, but it also profoundly felt like coming home. I looked at the clouds, and I did what is hardest of all for me to do usually, which is nothing at all. And I thought back to that wonderful phrase I had learned as a boy from Seneca, in which he says, "That man is poor not who has little but who hankers after more."

I do think it's only by stopping movement that you can see where to go. And it's only by stepping out of your life and the world that you can see what you most deeply care about and find a home. And I've noticed so many people now take conscious measures to sit quietly for 30 minutes every morning just collecting themselves in one corner of the room without their devices, or go running every evening, or leave their cell phones behind when they go to have a long conversation with a friend.

Movement is a fantastic privilege, and it allows us to do so much that our grandparents could never have dreamed of doing. But movement, ultimately, only has a meaning if you have a home to go back to. And home, in the end, is of course not just the place where you sleep. It's the place where you stand.

Vocabulary:

Pulsing, stretch, hanker after, collect oneself, privilege