There's something to be said for coming home. You roll into the house with the big suitcase, and everything is just the way it was left. The mail is still on the counter, and the coats are still on their hangers. The chair is still in front of the computer, and all of the files are still there, in their hierarchical messes.
It's sometimes a bit of a nonplus, to realize that nothing has caught fire, no pipes have burst, no floors have collapsed while you have been gone. Contrary to nearly everything else in the world, a home that is left alone while somebody is absent doesn't like to change itself very much at all.
You settle back in, and for a while, and it can feel like coming home for the first time all over again. The soul, as William Gibson correctly notes, travels slower than the traveler. When it's being reeled back into home, however, the effects become different than catching up to somebody away from home; for a short while, the pressures and duties that being at home usually carry are absent. Coming home can make home feel more like itself than being there. It makes life sweeter, but also crueler, a sine curve that puckers and shapes life into the form that it should be in.