It has been said that there is no destination in life. We do not journey through life hoping to make a safe landing at a place of our choice.
But it is a fact that for much of our life, many of us believe that we are going somewhere and once we get there, we can rejoice in our achievements and spend the rest of our lives being “happy”. It hardly works like that though.
Some of us realise quite early on that life is the journey that began somewhere before our birth and will keep going on even after we stop. We are the travellers on a road along with all the others who join us and walk with us for a while. To labor the analogy, it is not even a marathon where people drop out along the way, because who can tell where the finishing line is.
For some of us it is a voyage inside ourselves even as we perform mundane repetitive tasks every day. But in our heads we change and grow to become entirely different people as we collect experiences along the way and our perspective changes until towards the end we learn to forget old ways of thinking and discover a new simplicity in ourselves. We are not the complicated angst-ridden creatures that we imagined ourselves to be because fewer things now seem important and it is easier to distance ourselves from people and life in general.
Where we are going none of us know, but what we do know is that we need much less. It is time to leave behind the baggage that we have been dragging along and step out lightly into a new world that we must shape ourselves. What the years teach us we could not have learnt earlier because it takes years of experiencing life to learn even a little. Wisdom comes with age but there are those who learn more quickly than others.
Perhaps wisdom is what we have when we learn to give up expecting things to happen and instead learn to deal with whatever happens.
True, but personal growth doesn’t imply distancing oneself from life and people, nor does it imply we should become passive and reactive versus actively seeking out experiences. Being unfazed by change and certainty, and realizing that most things aren’t really that big a deal, is all you really need.