It occurred to me today that we’d be happier if we could just enjoy the journey.

I actually started writing this post months ago, after a conversation with a close friend of mine about people being too goal-oriented, rather than having an interest in the journey. I was telling this friend, at the time, about my attempts to get back on the treadmill and how difficult it was, after a period of being away, to get back into the habit. We talked about how I was wanting to build stamina and lose weight, but I was frustrated, not seeing any results.

Then, just the other day, I was talking to a different friend of mine about writing and wanting to be a famous writer but not wanting to have to do the work of writing everyday in order to become the successful writer that I dream of being.

Both of these conversations point to something in me that is so laser-focused on the goal that I am unable to appreciate the journey in getting to the goal. I think that there are many reasons for why I have such a hard problem with this (and I know that I’m not the only one), but these are probably the big three reasons.

1) We have been conditioned, as a society, to avoid difficult things. Things that are easy, quick, and pain-free have been served to us on the silver platter of the advertising machine for decades. I wrote about the easiness problem just recently, so I’m not going to beat that dead horse right here and now.

For example, they say diet and exercise are the steps to be taken to lose weight, but very few people are interested in committing long-term to this kind of lifestyle. So, instead we have diet shakes and New Year’s Resolutions and none of it really amounts to much. Why not, instead, commit to the idea of a journey –an hourly, daily, weekly devotion– that will forevermore include these hard things.

Life is supposed to be hard. If it were supposed to be otherwise, novels wouldn’t be three-hundred pages long, detailing the arduous journey of the protagonist.

2) Another part of the problem is that we don’t get recognition, or give recognition, for the individual steps of progress that are always part of any journey toward a goal. I know this is a problem of mine when I sit down to read some pages in the novel that I’m reading at any particular time, and I berate myself afterward if I didn’t get enough pages read. I hardly ever congratulate myself for having read a decent number of pages, and I am never proud of progress of even lesser consequence.

I saw a meme on Pinterest that said the we should be proud of every step in the right direction, rather than just being proud upon some final accomplishment. But, it really is a mind-shift for us to be self-congratulatory as we take each of our steps. I am always excited when I finish a novel, but I am rarely thus during the process of progress.

3) I think an additional part of the problem, maybe even a bigger part, is that we are too busy to be able to make changes. That’s a lesson I’m taking away from the COVID-19 quarantine; so many of the things that have made my life so damn busy in the past have been cancelled for the last several weeks. With those things out of the way, I have been able to do more writing and to be more faithful in my exercise routine. These changes in what I’m doing with my time, because of the freedom of having your “life” ripped away, they are resulting in changes in the way that I look at myself. I have to admit, I like what I’m spending my time doing these days more than I liked what I was spending my time doing before.

When we pack our lives with busy-ness, it makes it harder to be able to make changes when we discover that we don’t like the way that things are going. If you are looking at your life and you’re unhappy with the direction that it’s taking, you’re the captain of the ship, are you not?

What could you stop doing to make room for what it is that you want to be doing? Will it take a global pandemic to free you from the cage of that to which you’ve become accustomed?

Of course, once everything goes back to normal and I am going to be expected to go back to normal with it, I will have to fight some battles, I think, to be able to hold on to the changes that I’ve made. The world is going to expect me to pick up the load that they’d placed on me before all of this, and I’m not sure that I’m willing to pick that load back up.

***

It should have become obvious to you, during this post, that I think about story-telling when I think about journeys. For me, one of the most enjoyable parts of reading any story is to be a witness to a journey undertaken. When the main character is transformed at the end of the story, for better often, but sometimes for worse, it is enjoyable to have been a part of watching that happen.

When it comes to me, and my transformation, I have unfortunately been far too pre-occupied with the last few pages of the story. As unholy and wrong as it would seem to open a new novel, to flip to the last five pages, and to read it as if it were the only part of the story worth any consideration, it would be even more inappropriate because of what little I would understand, having skipped what came before.

Our stories only makes sense –we only make sense– when we consider the whole of each of our stories. How I end up wherever I end up is only going to make sense, only going to be enjoyable, in the larger context of the whole story.

And yet, this is what I so often do. In my mind, I think that the story leading up to the finale is worthless. The part of my mind that is interested in being a world-class runner and a New York Times best-seller, isn’t at all interested in the journey of getting there.

Thankfully, the avid reader in me understands what my mind does not: it’s all about the journey.