We're All Just Walking Each Other Home

Imagine a group of friends walking home together at night. As each person reaches their house, they peel off, until everyone has arrived and the walk is over. Life is a bit similar. We accompany one another for a while; some people join us for short periods, others for years, even decades. Nobody makes the entire journey with us, but while we’re here, we help one another along the way.

Ram Dass’s work on aging, love, and mortality returns to this theme repeatedly. He has written about how we are here to love one another, to ease suffering, and to accompany one another through the mystery of being alive and dying. The destination matters less than the companionship.

“We’re all just walking each other home.”

That’s one of the more beloved lines attributed to Dass, though there is some debate over whether he said these exact words. Regardless of origin, the idea resonates because it reframes life from a competition or “race” into something more akin to a shared journey, where we’re all in this together.

I enjoyed reading a reflection on this subject from Alan Seale, a leadership and transformation coach, and the founder and director of the Center for Transformational Presence. He writes:

I’m asking myself: What if the people I encounter in daily life are all, in their own way, walking me home? Probably very few of them have any conscious awareness of the roles they are playing in my life script. Yet what if they are just playing their part in helping me come home to who I really am? What if they are helping me find out what it means to be whole?

In the same way, what if I’m also walking them home? What if I’m playing a role in their homeward journey? What role might I choose to play for them?

And how might I choose to be with them if I consider that, at least for the moment, we are walking our homeward journeys side by side?

It’s a quick line that contains so much, notably: Friendship is more important than achievement. Love is presence more than advice. Nobody gets through life alone. The purpose is to make the walk (toward death) a meaningful one.

It also suggests that no one has everything figured out — figuring things out is a forever game. The people around us are companions, not rivals, and our job isn’t to save everyone or lead perfectly. It’s to help each other through the hard parts. Every conversation, kindness, friendship, and hello and goodbye is part of the same walk.

Many of you had teachers whose names you barely remember, coworkers you spent a few years beside, neighbors who moved away, friends you haven't spoken to in a decade…and most of them aren't part of your daily life anymore, yet pieces of them remain, maybe a lesson, a habit, a story, or a perspective. They walked beside you for a stretch of road, and because of that, your journey changed, even if just a tad.

We can’t spare people from loss, disappointment, or mortality. But we can accompany them. One of the more meaningful things we do is show up and keep walking beside someone. Eventually, they might do the same for us.