“It isn’t about the destination, but the journey”

How many times and different ways I’d heard this advice/quote/saying since I started this quest for self-transcendence (a new phrase I learned in the book The Finders, so lovingly gifted to me by my dear friend Tiffany)…it’s been peppered in by the universe at manageable intervals, but frequently. Each time, I think it depended on my threshold for frustration for lack of understanding how at the given moment of tap tap tap, remember?

The highest concentration of subtle messengers chiming some variation of the above quote came when I was three months into my backpacking trip. I had been walking around thinking about “my mission”…thinking is too carefree; ‘sweating over’ fits.

What am I supposed to be doing?

My attention was calibrated to only see any hints of what the end result of all of this may be. I didn’t feel I could properly execute and complete my mission if I didn’t know right now what the exact details were of what I was supposed to be doing.

When I was a kid, I think this tendency manifested in lighter, less paralyzing ways (maybe the same, considering adjustments for proper proportions). I would be so excited for my birthday, Christmas, my cousins coming to my soccer game, that I would stay in a pumped up state, sleep disrupted, anxiously and subconsciously attempting to speed time up with my tele-pathic? -kinetic? Eh, powers.

I’m sure I missed a lot of the memories being made in the days leading up to these big events. The formula by which I lived by was hyper-excitement (impaired function and absence) x number of days until event = 1250276 missed moments for 1-2 hours of ‘bliss’.

This is dramatic. I don’t think I was that absent, not because of excitement anyway. However, I remember being excited months before Halloween and months before Christmas. Just know there was a lot of day dreaming going on.

Now there is still excitement, but it feels much less concentrated. Not that I never feel it, but if you imagine the way I distributed my excitement when I was as a kid as the house that excessively decorates for every holiday on a mostly non-festive street, now it’s more like every house put up a few good strings of lights, some garland and a wreath…maybe a reindeer too.

I find pockets of excitement in every day, and I feel a low grade excitement most of the time, because life and the mystery of where it is going is what is exciting, and that’s continuous.

When I was focused on my mission, and the end goal, I was stressed. I wasn’t enjoying my backpacking trip. I spent the time feeling like I was failing because I wasn’t where I was supposed to be yet and I didn’t even know where that was!

At some point, the hints stopped. I remember deciding one day in India that I was done chasing the universe around. I just wanted to…be. By the end of the trip I had forgotten about the intensity of how I had viewed my mission and needing to accomplish it. Actually, it’s nice to laugh about it now.

Enjoying the journey is not an easy lesson. There are many moments of wondering what am I doing?! And how did I get here…and how do I get out of here?…..and why did I choose to come here…? Ultimately, it takes forgetting about the end to start enjoying the journey.

I’ve been working with a client lately and in helping him develop a goal for his life, or a purpose (no, not the purpose or mission), I reflected on the string of goals I had set for myself when I started my self-transcendence journey (yeah, liking that word, thanks Tiffany).

I want to be ascended.

I made that the center of my life for some months. It worked. It motivated me, but I laughed as I recalled the goal in a session with my client, because, although it is the result of all the efforts we all make to transcend ourselves, intensely focusing on that goal can surely drive you to a distorted space in between realities. You resist the choice you made to be a human in this reality. Or I sort of did anyway.

As time has passed, I’ve kept my goals in mind, but I’m being them instead of reciting them, so the intensity and hyper-focus (fixation?) isn’t necessary anymore. I’m living the life that I need to be. I’m still worried about if I’m making the right choices to lead me to creating what I came to earth to create, or heal or do or whatever it is, but I know that no matter what, I’m moving somewhere exciting and always moving towards it.

I caught up with a friend I hadn’t spoken with in several years. She asked if I felt fulfilled as spent my life bouncing around the world. I realized, yes, I do, not in every moment, or many, but I know that all of these moments are taking me closer to my purpose and that feels good.

Her idea of fulfillment was different. She felt like she had a lot to do to get to what her idea of fulfillment looked like.

I started to type a response and the good old quote popped into my head. It’s about the journey, not the destination…no, I didn’t say it to her. But in that moment, as I typed that I’ve been having fun with the process of getting closer to fulfillment, I realized, I had learned how to enjoy the journey without even trying. I was enjoying the journey. I am living the life that leads me towards my purpose with knowing that I’ll get there someday, and enough knowing to forget about getting there…most of the time 😉