The Search for Home in an Expanding Universe
This afternoon, Arash asked me where we lived before we lived here, and before that, and before that, tracing our addresses backward through time until we reached the question that stops all children eventually: “But where did we come from first?”
I tried to explain about ancestors and migrations, about how his great-great-grandparents traveled from places whose names we’ve forgotten to places they hoped would become home. But as I spoke, I realized he wasn’t asking about geography. He was asking about belonging. He was trying to understand why we all carry this deep sense of being displaced, of searching for something we can’t quite name.
Later, sitting on our small balcony, I thought about how we describe this feeling: homesick, even when we’re home. Nostalgic for places we’ve never been. Longing for something we can’t identify, in directions we can’t specify, with an intensity that seems disproportionate to any earthly destination.
Maybe this is because home, for humans, isn’t really a place at all.
I watch Happy arrange and rearrange our small apartment, moving furniture that fits perfectly well, adjusting photos that hang straight, searching for some configuration that will finally feel right. She’s been doing this for fifteen years, in three different apartments, and I’ve learned not to ask what she’s looking for because she doesn’t know either.
But I think I understand now. She’s not trying to improve our space—she’s trying to find the spatial arrangement that matches some internal template, some blueprint for belonging that exists deeper than memory, older than experience.
We all carry this template. It’s the reason we feel homesick for places we’ve never lived, why certain landscapes make us cry for reasons we can’t explain, why some buildings feel like coming home while others feel like exile no matter how long we stay in them.
I think it’s encoded in our DNA, this sense of displacement, because we are a species that evolved to wander. For most of human history, home was wherever the group was, and the group was always moving—following herds, seeking water, escaping danger, searching for something better beyond the next horizon.
But we’re also the first species to understand that we live on a planet, and that planet orbits a star, and that star is part of a galaxy, and that galaxy is part of a universe that is expanding in all directions at speeds too vast for comprehension. We know, now, that everything is moving away from everything else, that there is no fixed point in space, no cosmic address that stays constant.
We are homeless not just personally but cosmically. We search for home on a rock flying through infinite space in a universe that has no center, no permanent location, no stable reference point for belonging.
This knowledge should make the search for home feel futile. If the universe itself is expansion and movement and displacement, why do we keep looking for the place where we’ll finally feel we belong?
But maybe that’s exactly why we search so desperately. Because some part of us remembers when we did belong—not to a place but to a way of being in the world that didn’t require explanation, justification, or choice.
I think about Arash when he was very young, how he would curl up between Happy and me in bed, completely certain of his place in the world. He didn’t question whether he belonged with us—he simply belonged, the way water belongs to its riverbed, the way roots belong to their soil. His belonging was so complete he wasn’t even aware of it.
This is the home we’re all searching for: not a location but a state of being, not an address but a way of existing in the world without the constant anxiety that we might be in the wrong place, with the wrong people, living the wrong life.
But consciousness—the gift that makes us human—is also the curse that exiles us from this kind of belonging. The moment we become aware enough to ask “Do I belong here?” we become too aware to belong anywhere completely. Self-consciousness is the price we pay for consciousness, and homelessness is the price we pay for the ability to imagine home.
This is why we create homes from relationships rather than locations. Why Happy and I can move apartments and still feel like we’re coming home when we see each other at the end of the day. Why Arash can travel anywhere in the world and still be home as long as we’re with him.
We’ve learned to make home portable, to carry it inside us rather than finding it outside us. Home becomes not the place where we started but the place where we choose to build love, meaning, and connection despite knowing that everything—our bodies, our planet, our solar system, our universe—is temporary and moving.
But even this creates its own displacement. Because the people we love age and change and eventually leave us. Because the love we build, no matter how strong, exists in time and must end with time. Because even the most perfect relationship is still a temporary shelter in an expanding universe.
So we keep searching. We travel to new cities hoping to find the place that feels like home. We redecorate familiar spaces hoping to create the feeling of belonging. We form new relationships hoping to find the person who will make us feel finally, permanently settled.
And sometimes, briefly, we find it. There are moments—usually small ones—when the searching stops and we feel completely present, completely ourselves, completely where we belong. Happy laughing at something Arash said. Morning coffee in comfortable silence. The three of us working together to solve some household problem. These moments feel like coming home not to a place but to a way of being that requires no explanation or improvement.
Maybe this is the secret: we’re not supposed to find permanent home. Maybe the searching itself is home. Maybe displacement isn’t a problem to be solved but a condition to be embraced, the natural state of conscious beings in an expanding universe.
Maybe home isn’t where we’re going but how we travel. Not the destination but the company we keep on the journey. Not the place we find but the love we carry, the meaning we create, the connections we build while everything around us expands into increasing vastness.
Tonight, as I write this, Happy is reading in bed and Arash is dreaming in his room. Our small apartment floats through space on a planet that circles a star in a galaxy that moves away from other galaxies at incredible speed. We are all displaced together, all homeless in the cosmic sense, all searching for belonging in a universe that offers no permanent address.
But here, in this temporary configuration of love and care and daily routine, I feel something that might be home. Not because we’ve found the right place, but because we’ve chosen to stop searching long enough to build something beautiful in the place where we are.
The universe keeps expanding, carrying us further from whatever center we might once have had. But we keep creating new centers—small ones, temporary ones, centers made of attention and affection rather than geography and permanence.
And maybe that’s enough. Maybe home was never meant to be a place we find but a space we create, not a destination we reach but a way of being present to the people we love in whatever corner of the expanding universe we happen to be traveling through together.
We are all searching for home in a universe that’s constantly expanding, and perhaps the beautiful irony is that the search itself—the reaching toward each other across the increasing distances—is the only home we were ever meant to have.
