At 32 Lawrence Street, I saw a sign reading “Residents and Invited Guests.” It immediately struck me how perfectly it mirrors our human experience. We’re not residents here; we’re invited guests.
The Role of a Resident
Residents handle everything—mortgages, rents, insurance, homeowner meetings. They belong, manage, and maintain. Residents live as though this is their permanent space, shaping it to fit their needs and desires.
The Role of an Invited Guest
Invited guests, however, do none of these things. They arrive for a short while, honor the host, appreciate the surroundings, and then move on. That’s us. We’re here to discover and report on love, to immerse ourselves in what it means to live as separate beings, distinct individuals, so we can perceive something impossible to grasp in our true home.
Our True Residence: Oneness
Our true home is absolute oneness. There, everything merges. No perspective exists to describe it, no way to single out one experience from another. There’s nothing to say, paint, sing, or write because everything is everything. Perfect unity—pure love—but impossible to express.
That’s why we come here, as invited guests. Threaded out from the oneness, we gain contrast. We witness, taste, and feel. We converse, create, share. We tell others about love because we can finally see it defined against what it is not. And after a time, we return home. Death isn’t punishment. It’s simply stepping back into where we truly belong.
The Struggle of Mistaking Residency
The trouble starts when we mistake ourselves for residents. We start rearranging furniture, attending meetings, trying to control the invitation list, as if this temporary stay were ours to own. That struggle, that insistence on bending reality to our will, creates suffering. We’re fighting the nature of being a guest. We’re arguing with what is.
Living as an Invited Guest
Yet every moment you experience is now—only now. Past and future are ideas, abstractions. You’ve never lived in them. You just have this moment, this precious gift. All your needs are met right here. Your wants, however, will never be fully satisfied, because wants are attempts to play resident, to possess what can’t be possessed.
You can’t do this wrong, though. Even the desire to rearrange the furniture eventually shows you something about love. You will return home, having lived your guest experience fully. You’ll have seen and spoken and engaged in ways impossible in the oneness. You’ll have carried what you’ve learned back to that place where words fail.
And that, truly, is enough.