Embracing the journey
When your life is shattered by disgrace you crave an end to your suffering and you look forward to a destination point from which life won’t seem so catastrophically overwhelming. “Just get me to the end! Get me through this,” you beg the universe.
Life is not, as they say, about the destination. We are to embrace the journey. But what is that supposed to mean if it feels like we’re being dragged through a gravel road, face down by our feet? How masochistic does one need to be to say that they are somehow enjoying this journey of turbulence and woe?
The reason why it is wise to embrace the journey is because it is always a journey. All destinations are just points in the journey. There is no end. If you don’t embrace the journey now you might never and if you can do so when life is at its more difficult how much more satisfying will it be when you’re actually upright, perhaps even catching the view? Writer and successful coach Paul Assaiante argues that “all rivers run into the sea and yet the sea is never full.” Water is always flowing, changing, and adapting. It doesn’t cease being water once it reaches it’s “destination”. There is not end. No ultimate goal.
You don’t strive and struggle with the hopes of maybe getting into heaven later. You strive and struggle so that you can be in a heavenly state now, in the mud, in the blood, in the anguish. You have to learn how to be in heaven now if you ever want to a chance to recognize it, let alone be in it later.
The Buddhist recognizes that life is suffering, “dukkah.” The goal is paradoxically not to end suffering but to accept it. Your desire to end your suffering might be the very force that is keeping you from moving through it. It was Marcus Aurelius who said that, “the impediment to action advances action; what stands in the way becomes the way.” Trying to make this problem go away could very well be what’s keeping you from learning what it is you could learning from the whole situation to begin with.
Part of the benefits of suffering is the clarity and brightness that comes from any tiny break. Every breath when you’re drowning, every morsel of food when you’re starving, and every social interaction when you are disgraced is highlighted as if it were the pinnacle of existence itself.
This is the time where the most significant changes can be made to your character. Think of it like becoming fit. You could reach olympic level fitness but if you view it as a destination you will start to atrophy immediately after you take off your gold medal. Fitness isn’t a destination and neither is flourishing after a terrible emotional loss. So the destination that you’re dying to get to? The one where supposedly your problems can be solved? I hate to break it to you, you’re already here. Life is the destination and it sucks sometimes. The resolution you seek, if there is such a thing, happens as you go through life, not avoid it or wish it away.