When the Journey is as Important as the Destination

Welcome to Taking My Own Medicine Mondays

There’s a Buddhist saying that I love:  There is no there, only here.

I’ve been thinking about striving, and “Being Enough” and how we’re all working so hard to get “somewhere,” yet when we arrive there’s always someplace further to go, something more to do, something else to prove.

It’s not that ambition is a bad thing.  Not at all.  But, there’s a difference between wanting to expand and grow and relentlessly chasing a dream.  There’s a difference between having a goal and working toward it and thinking you can’t really live life fully until you achieve it.

Making the Journey as Enjoyable As the Destination

It’s a delicate balance; a balance that has eluded me until now.  I’ve had a terrible habit of withholding love, approval, and validation from myself because I was not where I thought I should be in life. I allowed my state of mind to be determined by how close or far away I was from whatever goal I had at the time.
Whether it was in the area of career, relationship or dissatisfaction with my body there was always something I had to achieve before I could be happy, before I could fully inhabit my life, before I could exhale.

Arrival takes one second.  The journey is where we spend our time.

Why do we think that the road to the dream is less important than the dream itself?

I’ve made a radical decision; I’ve decided to live my life so that the journey is as enjoyable as the destination.

I will not withhold love, approval and validation from myself regardless of how far away I am from what I want.

And when I say “withhold love and approval” here’s what I’m referring to:

• Missing out on the good things in front of me because I’m so caught up in feeling bad about what I don’t have in life.  In other words, not being present in the moment.

• Being so obsessed with productivity and getting somewhere that I forget to take some time every day to slow down and just breathe and feel grateful for everything I do have.

• Focusing on what’s not working instead of what is.

• Losing sight of everything that you’ve done in favor of focusing on what still needs to be done.

• Overlooking all of the nice things that you do for others.

• Forgetting to acknowledge mysel for just “showing up” in the myriad of situations that I don’t want to deal with; that are uncomfortable or painful in some way.

What I want NOW

I want the here and now to be joyful and not just a vehicle to some destination in the future that I may or may not get to.  I want to be happy now.  I’m tired of waiting for X, Y, or Z.
I want to end the suffering that I inflict on myself because I’m not “there”– wherever “there” is at the moment.

Dreams Change

The ironic thing about goals is that as you go through life, the dream changes.  Is what you dreamt for yourself ten or twenty years ago the same as the dream you have for yourself today?

I doubt it.

I found an old wish list from 1994 of things that I wanted to have or accomplish.  Some of them I got, some of them I didn’t get, but most of them are no longer important to me.  My dreams have changed.  And so if the dreams are the variable then what remains constant is the journey.

So how about it?  How about refusing to withhold love, validation, and approval from yourself just because you aren’t where you think you should be.

How about allowing yourself to be happy whether you’ve gotten “there” or not?

I can promise you, it will make the journey so much better.
I’ll leave you with lyrics from RENT by Jonathan Larson who got “there” but whose journey was tragically cut short and never knew he had arrived.
There’s only us
There’s only this
Forget regret
Or life is yours to miss
No other road
No other way
NO DAY BUT TODAY.