Mission Improbable Part 2: The Journey is the Destination

In an earlier post I said that Jesus’ words “Seek and ye shall find” may be interpreted as “If you’re seeking, you’ve already found.” Or “the journey is the destination.” Knowing this removes all fear of failure from the process of personal growth and achievement. If the process is the goal, then by embracing the process we’ve already succeeded.

This perspective creates a huge shift in my way of being in the world. Fear of failure, perfectionism, burnout (and the related tedium of practice) – all of these melt away as I continually and convincingly remind myself that we’re here on this plane for the joy of the journey – not to reach some distant, craggy mountaintop. The mountains are there, and some journeys head up the side of them, but the mountaintop isn’t the goal. If you set your sights high enough, you’ll never reach the top of the mountain – and I submit that this is the most powerful journey of all!

So relax! We can never “arrive.” There is no place to end up, other than “better than we started.” And even “better” can be defined in so many ways that performance pressure is eliminated. The only rational response to a reality like this is Joy.

To take joy in the journey is a high value of mine. I don’t always find myself “happy” in the conventional sense. But when my perspective on my situation is reasonable, laughter is inevitable.

Once, in a dark melancholy, I talked to my spiritual advisor about my beleaguered situation. After detailing my woes (God bless him for listening), I said, “Sometimes I feel like God is up there laughing at me.” He said, “He probably is. He knows what’s on the other side of your suffering.”

I hope I never forget the profound wisdom and mountaintop perspective of this statement. To interpret our circumstances from the perspective of being wrapped up in them is self-defeating, demoralizing, and wrong-minded. It is infinitely better to sit next to God during such dark nights and laugh.

I find laughter to be a diagnostic tool: If I can laugh at myself, deeply, heartily laugh at my mistakes and foibles, I’m in a pretty good place. The moment I stop laughing, begin focusing on the problems and stewing in my emotional juices, I can rest assured that my choice of perspective is to blame.

So does that mean I approach each and every day with a smile on my lips and animated birds flying around me, chirping the tune to a Disney tune and helping me clean the house? No (although I must admit that the concept of animated helpers is appealing). But I know that when I stop laughing, I need to shake my thinking up, or I will eventually (actually, with shocking speed) sink into a morass of self-pity and immobilization. Such a place is more difficult to emerge from, so these days I try to intervene earlier in the process.

Never doubt that the free-fall into self-pity and immobilization is a process. I used to essentially define myself by my self-pity and shame. This unlovely practice felt automatic, like “reality.” It took my spiritual advisor smacking me with a spiritual baseball bat to get me to pay enough attention to see that I wasn’t self-pitying and shameful automatically, that I actually took myself there.

Once I began to realize that there was a difference between “me” and “self-pity and shame,” I found an interval of time during which, if I was aware and honest about it, I could stop taking myself there. Perhaps this sounds elementary and self-evident, but to my broken mind and spirit, this was a life-changing revelation.

I began to practice noticing, and after awhile I got to a point where, like Ronald Reagan, I would step back and say to myself: “There you go again!” And this would make me laugh. Soon enough, I discovered how healing and powerful this ability to laugh at my own shortcomings was. It was the beginnings of Humility for me, and I now know beyond doubt that Humility is one of the greatest healers of all time.

Released from the bondage of my internal shame- and self-pity-generating “engine,” I was able to step back from my occasional bouts of (what I call) “selective idiocy” and deeply, wholeheartedly, belly-laugh at myself. Talk about enjoying the journey! If the worst thing that can happen to me is that I fail and have a good laugh about it (and learn from it to boot), what is there to fear in life?

So if my accountant and my attorney think I’m nuts for ditching a good-paying job for following my bliss and creating my own business based on unconventional investment strategies and a world of unknowns, screw ‘em! I’ve decided to enjoy my journey, and just keep trudging the path. I believe that as long as I keep my eyes on the mountaintop and keep walking, I won’t get lost. And holy crap! Even the views from the mountainside are breathtaking!