JOURNEY. JOURNEY. JOURNEY.
IT"S ALL ABOUT THE JOURNEY.
It has been said many times that life is a journey. In fact, it has become quite a fashionable term, yet it is such an important term to embrace in our passage through life. A Journey is a thing with a beginning, a middle and an end. The longer the journey the more likely that middle part is going to throw a lot of things at us. To continue down our familiar metaphor road, life is an ocean of sorts. More more than just of sorts. It is a thing of predictability mixed with chaos. Of stillness and calm, that can turn into relentless challenge, even merciless madness much faster than we would wish for.
I have another old metaphor that I use to quite an extreme, The old captain on a ship thing. But I like to think of our Captain as the best of us. What is not the best of us is not a very good Captain. Lost in our challenges on the sea of life, we can lose touch with our wisdom, our sense of direction, maybe we never had a direction to begin with. We need to be able to step off of our ship, so to speak and reconnect, or perhaps connect for the first time, with our wisdom. To do this, we need to see life as the journey it is.
Our job is to avoid mistakes when we can, but it is not to avoid challenges or experiences. I see all the things we go through as islands, be they prosperity or debt, anger or sadness, happiness or euphoria. Everything we can experience exists within us and we will visit everything in our lives, whether through physical experiences, relations, or perhaps dreams and fantasies. The most powerful things will drag the best us into places we will struggle. Our greatest anger, Our greatest sadness. Perhaps our greatest ailment or greatest financial crisis. If we think we can assign some of these to our selves and the rest to others, we will find out we are sadly mistaken. In life, as tough as it can be, we want to be forged. This is the mind of what I refer to as our captain. Our captain craves wisdom and sometimes, if not always, the only way to get that wisdom is by passing a great challenge. In our lifetimes, more like many great challenges.
Journeys can have goals, but we need to be careful about these things. We can make lots of money and be miserable. We can be famous and just feel used by everybody. And we can chase happiness only to find it slips through our hands every time we get it. Health is always a worthy goal. Wisdom is the other. To this, we cannot get happiness in the midst of deep sadness or in the midst of anger. But we can find strength and wisdom. And we can look after our health and not punish our bodies for the stress we are passing through.
The notion of a journey can help separates us from an unhealthy past. A journey means we are dropped into somebody’s house, not of our choosing. We begin where we begin. It gives us the challenges it gives us. It gives us the love or the lack of love that it does, not our choice. We are also given a disposition. A set of strengths and weaknesses and those are predefined. Everyone has theirs so it is not an excuse. It is another challenge of our life to fid and employ our strengths. The best of us evolve beyond our weaknesses regardless of what they are, not to perfection, but to the best version of our selves.
I am sorry, but the final destination for all of us is the same. We all get reclaimed by the universe. In this, there is no right or wrong journey. There are journeys in which some experience more suffering than others. This is a thing. How do we minimize our suffering? Hopefully, not a drug addiction. It is great challenge to live a life in which our suffering is minimized and yet we are not trying to escape. It is the wisdom thing. Perhaps this is what our wisdom is serving the most, if we can find it. Your life is a journey. You will spend time in heaven and you will certainly know when you have your time in hell. And you will pass through everything in between. Hang on. Imagine you are on a boat sailing out to sea. You get out to the middle of the sea and you ask your self, what is the answer to all of this? Why does this have ot be such a challenge? In the middle of the sea we should recognize these are pointless questions. The only question that matter are, what direction do you want to go? Life will unfold our journeys along the way. No matter which way we go, we still must face the sea and we must land in new places and figure out how to deal with them. We will be welcomed in some, and unwanted in others. We will find that everywhere go gives us something but leaves something out. The completeness of life comes in pieces. And yet we can feel complete within by collecting those pieces. Those pieces, we will find, are the bitter and sweet pieces. We can be made of sugar. Sugar comes crashing down.
Our journey is a finite thing and yet we can still feel timeless on our journeys. When we are just present, time collapses and fear goes away. We are just another on one of billions of journeys, all familiar in a certain way. The pain, the joy, the challenges. What are we going to do with this particular journey?