Have you woken up to the journey of life? Have you reached a point where you long for “something more”? Have the things you have striven to achieve turned out to be far less than enough? Do you desire to unriddle life’s mystery and pursue a life rich with significance? Long Journey Home is a seeker’s road map to the quest for meaning. Rich in stories and profoundly personal as well as practical, it explores the great philosophies of life and charts the road toward meaning taken by countless thoughtful seekers over the centuries. Written for those who care and those who are open, “it assumes no faith in the reader, only the recognition that the humanness of life as a journey is something we should all care about enough to seek to make sense of it and to make up our minds for ourselves.” How do we unriddle the mystery of life and make the most of it? What does it mean to find ourselves guests on a tiny, spinning blue ball in a vast universe? Is our sense of individual uniqueness backed by a guarantee, or are we only dust in the wind?… Long Journey Home is written for those who are asking enduring questions like these .–Os Guinness Have you woken up to the journey of life? Have you reached a point where you long for something more ? Have the things you have striven to achieve turned out to be far less than enough? Do you desire to unriddle life s mystery and pursue a life rich with significance? Long Journey Home is a seeker s road map to the quest for meaning. Rich in stories and profoundly personal as well as practical, it explores the great philosophies of life and charts the road toward meaning taken by countless thoughtful seekers over the centuries. Written for those who care and those who are open, it assumes no faith in the reader, only the recognition that the humanness of life as a journey is something we should all care about enough to seek to make sense of it and to make up our minds for ourselves. From the Hardcover edition. Have you woken up to the journey of life? Have you reached a point where you long for "something more"? Have the things you have striven to achieve turned out to be far less than enough? Do you desire to unriddle life's mystery and pursue a life rich with significance? "Long Journey Home is a seeker's road map to the quest for meaning. Rich in stories and profoundly personal as well as practical, it explores the great philosophies of life and charts the road toward meaning taken by countless thoughtful seekers over the centuries. Written for those who care and those who are open, "it assumes no faith in the reader, only the recognition that the humanness of life as a journey is something we should all care about enough to seek to make sense of it and to make up our minds for ourselves." "From the Hardcover edition. Os Guinness was born in China and educated in England. He did undergraduate studies at the University of London and postgraduate work at Oriel College, Oxford, where he earned a D.Phil in the social sciences. Formerly a guest scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Studies and Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution, Os is currently Senior Fellow at the Trinity Forum in McLean, Virginia. Widely traveled, he has written or edited more than twenty books, including The American Hour , Time for Truth, and The Call . He makes his home in northern Virginia. Long Journey Home A Guide to Your Search for the Meaning of Life By OS Guinness Waterbrook Press Copyright © 2003 OS Guinness All right reserved. ISBN: 9781578568468 Chapter One Waking Up to the Journey * * * "I'm at a point in my life where I realize there has to be somethingmore." The speaker, a man elegantly dressed, had come up to me after adinner near San Francisco at which I'd been asked to give someremarks on the modern world's search for meaning. He cut straight tothe point, and there was an intensity in his voice that immediately sethim apart from the surrounding small talk. "Like many of my friends around here," he continued, "I'velearned a lesson I wish I'd known when I started out: Having it all justisn't enough. There's a limit to the successes worth counting and thetoys worth accumulating. Business school never gave me a calculus forassessing the deeper things of life." Many of the guests at the dinner were eminent names from theworld of high finance in the city and the world of high technology inSilicon Valley farther south. Their conversation was flush with the successof the twentieth century's last two decades, a period that witnessedthe greatest legal creation of wealth in history, much of it in that verycorner of the world. In my remarks to them, I hadn't uttered the phrase "somethingmore." But in separate conversations with me afterward, no fewerthan four people-each with a very different story-used those verywords to express their sense of longing. As it happens so often in life,the very things they had striven to achieve turned ou