Sunday on our way to church my almost five-year-old daughter said to me, "Dad now that I'm in 123 I feel all broked up." I said, "What do you mean broken up, sweetie?" She replied, "I feel broken up and switched around. I feel switched." When I pressed her again she went into a longer explanation.
She moved into a new room recently and while a lot of her friends from her old room (127) also moved to new rooms, a few still remain. So she has a new room, a new teacher, and new kids to get to know. She admitted that sometimes when her class is outside she'll peek in the windows of her old class, even though they're not supposed to. She said she can see her friends in there, and she rattled off four or five names. As a dad this is a bit heartbreaking.
Because I'm an idiot, I asked her, "What do you think you need to feel wholeness?" I mean, I'm seriously an idiot. She loves me, though, and she's only 5 so she just asked, "What's wholeness?"
Good question.
As adults we know what it's like to feel broked up. Something is missing. Something feels uncomfortable. Something is incomplete. Or maybe we feel like something used to be there and now it's gone. It's not always so easy to put our finger on what the feeling is or where it comes from. Certainly the cause of this feeling isn't usually as obvious to us as moving into a new classroom.
We talked about the new friends Nora has in 123 and then I asked, "Don't you think if you went back to 127 you would miss the girls we just talked about?" Matter-a-factly she said, "No." Like, duh, dad. But I suspect she would, in fact, miss them and her new teacher and their activities.
Wholeness isn't available to us as a return. As much as we would like to be able to go home again, to be embraced as a child by mom, to return to old friends and familiar places, we know deeply that they can't embrace us as they once did. We also know that in our attempted return we will leave behind things that have become familiar, and that by returning we again leave behind a part of ourselves.
Wholeness—whatever we mean by wholeness—can only be found where we stand now. More than that, I feel wholeness is only ever something that visits us—we do not visit it nor attain it by an action of the will. We may cultivate an awareness of the presence of wholeness in our lives, interact with it, even develop an intimate relationship with wholeness as we do with a friend or a lover, so that wholeness becomes an integral part of who we are and how we act in the world.
But we cannot go back to 127.