Tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present, since it is in the present and only in the present that you live.
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety
Many moons ago, I got into a somewhat heated debate with a friend about what was more important in life, the journey or the destination. I had just come off reading Stephen R. Covey’s, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and was charged to get someplace new—fast.
I had fervently embraced the second habit, Begin with the End in Mind, and was certain the most effective way to get to personal fulfillment was to define my destination, chart my course—identifying all the steps I was going to make along the way—and then get moving.
As I understand it now, the point my friend was laboring to make was, so what if you do all that hoop jumping—pushing yourself through a predefined gauntlet of goals—to get somewhere that you think is going to make you feel satisfied with your life and find out once you get there that it isn’t the magic bullet you were hoping for? Or say you get there, feel good about yourself for a moment, and then what? You’re right back to planning the next place to be, other than “right here, right now” so you can feel that your life is meaningful in some way.
Well, if I would have stopped to really listen to my friend’s wisdom, rather than defend a position, I might have saved myself a lot of grief. In the long run I learned she was right, it isn’t the destination that holds the key to life, its the journey.
For one thing, the person we are when we set-out for a destination is not necessarily the same person we are when we arrive. The journey itself informs and shapes us. If we aren’t paying attention in the moment-to-moment experience of walking our path, we may indeed get to our final destination, but in arriving realize what we thought would make us feel personally fulfilled a long time ago doesn’t appeal to us anymore.
Likewise, if we hang our happiness on a hook in the future—i.e. if I reach such and such goal, then I’ll know I’ve arrived—not only do we miss living our moment-to-moment experience, we also set ourselves up for disappointment in every moment we’re not living up to our own expectations.
I’m not entirely begrudging the idea of having goals. There is definitely value in having interests and pursuing what we think in the present moment will help us fulfill those interests. However, along any goal-oriented personal journey, it’s essential to stay aware and attentive to the experience throughout. Doing so gives us opportunity to check-in with how we are feeling about our experience and tweak or adjust our aspirations, if we find it necessary.
Living is not a destination, it is a constantly evolving moment-to-moment series of experiences. The beauty of the compilation of a lifetime can easily be lost if our eyes are always focused on a future that has yet to exist, and may never manifest in the way we’ve constructed it in the mind. Ultimately, living with gratitude and a sense of excitement for the adventure we’re having, while we’re having it, IS the place to “be.”
Perspectives: Opening to Another’s Experience