B: We get lost in the story of our culture, of our society, and sometimes later in life we wake up and say, wait a minute, who am I? What am I doing here?
NORMAN FISCHER: My previous book was called Taking Our Places. I didn't plan it this way, but I now see that Taking Our Places is a book about the first half of life, about establishing your life, and now this book is about the second half of life, coming home.
At the end I talk about death, that we get to be a certain age, and then the first thing that happens is our parents are elderly. And how many people do we all know who have parents in their 80s or 90s that the children are worried about taking care of and seeing through the last passage? And then the next thing is, it's your turn, and you turn toward that part of life. And that's part of coming home. Coming home is really coming home to silence, coming home to the end of life, and I write about that at the end of the book.
So I think the two books are companions to one another. Both of them of course are based on meditation practice, on spiritual practice and religious life. In Taking Our Places I say religious life is just growing up, it's just being a mature person. It's not a special thing. And then in this book I say, and, when you mature, you realize you have to come home.
And coming home is coming home to acceptance of a lot of life's disasters and passions and forgiveness and all the things that have happened, and then finally taking care of the end of life.
B: Thank you so much.
NORMAN FISCHER: Thank you.
