I don’t wake up looking forward to the day ahead.
That’s not a complaint, exactly. It’s just the truth. There’s the alarm waking me up, and then the decisions — where to eat, what to eat — and then the slow accumulation of everything else that has to be done or decided or gotten through. Some mornings, I pray that God will either take me or come again today. Not out of despair, exactly. More out of a bone-deep exhaustion with the whole project of being here, and a genuine, serious hope that what comes next will be something this world can’t touch.
C.S. Lewis would have understood that. I think he’d have called it by its right name.
A Feeling Without a Name
He borrowed a German word for the feeling: Sehnsucht. It translates roughly as longing or yearning, though neither of those quite carries the weight he meant. He also called it Joy, which is confusing until you understand that he didn’t mean happiness. He meant something sharper. Something that hurts a little, even as it thrills you.
Most people describe it as being triggered by something. A piece of music. A landscape. The slant of afternoon light in October. For Lewis, it started with a tiny garden his brother made from a tin lid and some moss and twigs — something about that small, made thing pierced him in a way he spent the rest of his life trying to explain.
For me, it doesn’t work quite that way. Nothing triggers it, exactly. It’s more of an ache. The ache isn’t attached to anything in particular. It’s just there — underneath the ordinary weight of the day, underneath the decisions about what to eat and what to do and whether to do anything at all. A persistent sense that this is not quite home. That I am not quite where I belong.
That’s the word Lewis kept coming back to. Homesickness. But a peculiar kind of homesickness — for a place you’ve never been, or can’t remember, or can’t locate on any map. You haven’t lost it. You can’t remember it. And yet the longing feels like a memory. Like something sitting just at the edge of your mind that you can almost, but not quite, reach.
The Three Mistakes
Lewis identified three ways people respond to this longing, and he thought two of them were wrong.
The first is chasing whatever seems to trigger it. The music, the place, the memory — you go back hoping to recapture the feeling. It never works. The music is just music now. The feeling has moved on, and you’re left trying to understand why the things that used to move you have gone flat.
The second mistake is deciding that the feeling was never real. You write it off as sentiment, nostalgia, romantic nonsense. You get practical. And you lose something in the process, though it can be hard to name exactly what.
The third way — the one Lewis argued for — is to treat the longing as a signal. Not to chase what seems to trigger it, and not to dismiss it, but to ask honestly what it might be pointing toward.
The Argument from Desire
That’s where his argument gets interesting. And, for me, unresolved.
Lewis observed that natural desires correspond to real things. Hunger points to food. Loneliness points to other people. These desires exist because their objects exist. So what about this one — this ache for somewhere that has no earthly address, for something no earthly thing can quite deliver? If the pattern holds, it ought to be pointing to something real, too.
His conclusion was that we were made for another world. That this homesickness is a homing instinct. That nothing here fully satisfies it because nothing here was ever meant to.
He put it plainly in The Weight of Glory: if we find in ourselves a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.
I find that both compelling and empty. Compelling because it actually accounts for the experience — for why the most beautiful things in this world make you a little sad, why every arrival carries a faint underscore of not quite, why even the best moments have that quality of not being entirely enough. Empty because knowing an argument is persuasive and actually being at peace with it are two different things, and I’m still somewhere in between.
Signals and Sources
What I keep returning to is this: Lewis refused to call the ache a problem.
We live in a world that treats every form of dissatisfaction as something to be fixed. If you feel a persistent sense of not-quite-rightness, there’s something to take or do or optimize. Lewis looked at that same feeling and said — pay attention to it. Don’t chase it, don’t suppress it, follow it. It’s one of the most important things about you.
He described the things that seem to gesture toward the longing as signals rather than sources. They are, as he wrote in The Weight of Glory, “the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.” They’re not the destination. They’re pointing somewhere.
I’m a genealogist. I spend a good portion of my life following signals — tracing where people came from, working backward through records, documents, and courthouse files, trying to find the source. There’s something in that work that resonates with what Lewis is describing. The signals are real. The pointing is real. The question is whether you’re willing to follow where they lead.
Home Is Close
I pray occasionally — more than occasionally, if I’m honest — for God to take me or for Christ to come again today. Not because I’ve given up, but because another day in this life feels genuinely burdened, and what I understand of eternity makes the word hope feel almost too small for what I mean.
I’m reminded of 1st John 2:15, that “…If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” Well, any love I’ve had for the world is long gone.
I don’t fully understand Heaven. I don’t think anyone does. But what I understand of it makes words like awesome and fantastic feel woefully inadequate — like describing the ocean as wet. Christ promised a mansion. I believe him. And some mornings, the gap between here and there feels very wide.
Lewis would say that the gap is the point. That the width of it is itself evidence of something. That a creature made only for this world would not feel the distance the way I do.
I’m still working out whether he’s right. But I’ve stopped trying to argue myself out of the longing. It’s there every morning, quiet and persistent, underneath everything else. And if Lewis is correct — if it really is a homing instinct, if it really does point somewhere — then maybe the most faithful thing I can do is keep paying attention to it.
The homesickness, it turns out, may be the most honest thing I feel.