In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

There are some opening lines from books that reach into your heart and recapture your imagination, and this is one of them. It conjures up late nights, reading tented under your blankets in bed; rays casting across the page from the streetlight in the parking lot outside the door to the hospital where my father was doing rounds; long plane trips across the country to my grandparents home and later, to and from college. Long hot summers, laying on the couch, Dawn Upshaw’s voice coming out of the radio.

I’ve read The Hobbit at least once a year since I was fourteen, so I have a lot of memories of reading it.

We, like Bilbo, are drawn into the adventure almost without realizing it. There we are, curled up in a comfy seat, wrapped in a blanket with a big cup of tea, leaning back against the cushions, ready for a lazy afternoon reading while the cold, wet rain splatters against the windows. And there’s Bilbo, sitting lazily on his front stoop, smoking and blowing lazy smoke rings, full of second breakfast and thinking about crumpets and tea. An old man in a funny hat with a long beard approaches and Bilbo wishes him a good day – and before he knows it, his hole is full of dwarves who are eating his food, filling his home with pipe-smoke, and singing about dark deeds late into the night.

It’s like when you come into work on a lazy Friday morning, the rain is beating against your office windows, you’ve ordered soup and a grilled cheese to arrive for lunch and cleared your afternoon so you can catch up before the weekend. And then, before you know it, your 9:30 meeting spawns a 10:30 meeting and a noon trouble-shooting session, and a Teams chat that disappears down a rabbit hole. And your 11:00 turns into three other meetings and your soup doesn’t show up and your grilled cheese arrives cold – and now, on top of everything else, you have to figure out how to get the app to refund you for the missing soup and your afternoon is filled with meetings and you end up working until 6 pm.

And then you have to walk home through the pouring rain and you totally sympathize with Bilbo, missing his cloak and his pocket handkerchief.

And Bilbo makes mistakes, just like you make mistakes, and he is learning and you are learning – but you don’t have to worry about getting eaten – and getting all your colleagues eaten – by Trolls.

And when you feel lost in the forest and climb a tree and look all about you and see nothing but the tops of trees and you can’t see a way out of the forest, before you lose heart just remember that when that happened to Bilbo, he didn’t realize that the tree he climbed was in the midst of a depression so, when it looked like there was no end to the forest in sight, it was because the trees were gently rising up around him. The forest’s edge was not that far, he just couldn’t see how close it is – and neither can you. It’s like when you have a bad cold – after the first day or two, you feel like you’ve been sick forever and that you’ll be sick forever more. And then, just a few days later, you wake up starting to feel better and you think, wow, maybe someday I won’t have this cold anymore. And each day after that, you feel just a little bit better until finally you are relieved to not have the cold anymore.

Someday you reach your destination and then you have to face the fact that you’re not quite sure what to do once you’re there. Those around you lose their heads and you think with longing of the cozy life you left behind, but you don’t want to leave your friends behind, the friends you’ve come through thick and thin with. You want to do what’s right but it all turns out wrong and, though you escape with your life and a pretty good retirement fund, and a lot of stories.

When you get home, everyone has written you off and your cozy home doesn’t feel so cozy anymore and everyone complains that you’ve changed and are suspiciously different.

And then you go through it again and again and again as your life cycles and rotates and grows and changes.

And all that time, there is The Hobbit, in your pocket, in your bag, on your shelf, a touchstone that tells you it’s going to be okay, over and over again.