What’s More Important: The Journey or the Destination?
If life is a journey, what is the destination and what happens when we finally arrive there?
The last thing my dad ever said to me before he died of lung cancer was a short, three-word sentence. I had flown from my then-home in Berlin to Los Angeles to see him one last time before lung cancer would take him away forever. Those sixty seconds between when I announced it was time for me to leave to catch my flight back to Europe and actually walking out of my parents’ front door, were the most grueling sixty seconds of my life.
After a long hug, an exchange of “I love yous,” and one more look into his eyes—his face drooped and his nostrils pulsing from his oxygen tube—I turned and began walking away with tears in my eyes. As I was crossing the threshold of the house, he called out, “David?” I turned back and he said, “Enjoy your life.” These were words spoken by someone who knew he only had a few days or weeks left in his 80-year-old life. This wasn’t a suggestion; it was a command. Do it now or you’ll be like me. I think my dad generally enjoyed some aspects of his life except for the long daily commutes to and from work in the monstrous Los Angeles traffic. And, as he told me on the phone when I called him from Berlin a few months earlier: “I only regret that I worked too much and didn’t get to spend as much time with my family as I would have liked,” he said. “I didn’t get to see as much of the world as I would have liked.”
I knew his final three-word sentence was less advice to me and more of an expression of regret for him, spoken by someone whose life was possibly a few setting suns from permanently going dark. Still, though, minutes later when I was driving away, wiping tears from my eyes, his simple words never felt more profound.
Had he lived a few more years to experience the Great Plague of 2020, I wonder if he would have stated the same dictum. For obvious reasons, it’s not easy to enjoy life right now. For less obvious reasons, there’s something deeper bubbling just under the surface of our consciousness. It’s about the future. Or lack thereof.
That’s because ever since March 2020, there has been no future. Of course, there will be a future, but the difference between now and, say, a year ago is that for the first time in many of our lives, it’s hard to envision a future for ourselves, for our family and friends, and, weirdly, for the history of humanity. It’s not that the human race is going to be wiped out—though, right now who knows?—but that we can’t envision what life is going to be like in, say, a year or what we’ll be doing or where we’re going to travel next. It’s seriously anxiety-inducing for many of us. We can’t imagine what our social lives are going to be like. We can’t imagine sitting indoors in a bar with friends. Dating? Indoor dinner parties in winter? Headache-free travel? It all seems like life as we knew it has come to an end. And so has the future.
The only way we can maneuver, even survive without eventually imploding, is to change our outlook on life and the world. And reality. We can learn from this moment. We can take away a lesson that we’ll keep with us for a lifetime; it will soothe our 3am thoughts and massage our random reflections on the future. It’s about how we think about life as we know it.
Going from point A to point B
Inspiration travel quotes, TED Talks, and advertisements aimed at college students use the oft-repeated phrase “life is a journey.” It has a nice ring to it because, ultimately, most of us love to travel and also the word “journey” is drenched in wisdom.
But do we really want life to be a journey? I don’t know about you, but unless I’m on a train in Switzerland or in a helicopter hovering over Manhattan, I usually loathe the journey. Going from point A to point B is often an arduous affair that involves lines, crowds, having to be confined to a tiny space for hours on end, and subpar gruel. Journeys are dull. They’re tiring. They’re fraught.
If “journey” is used as a metaphor for life, the voyage of life is even worse. If life is a journey—a word that comes from medieval French for a day’s worth of travel—then what is the destination? Death. We don’t allow for any in between: it’s about either the journey or the destination.
But think back to when you were a child and you envisioned your future. It likely looked a lot like your parents’ situation at the time. For me, every time I heard the Prince song “1999,” which was in heavy rotation on MTV and mainstream radio in 1983, it would frequently inspire me to ponder where I’d be in the actual year of 1999. (The song, by the way, is about the end of the world.) I’d do the math and figure out that I’d be 28 in 1999. I envisioned being married, having a child, owning a house in the suburbs, and working in an office. That’s all fine. But it melts into this long line of societal approved steps: graduate from college, get a 9-5 job, get married, buy a house, have kids, look to the future when we’re 65 years old and are finally free from this assembly line life. But then, what happens? We’ve only got a few years to celebrate said freedom. And in many cases, because we’re at an AARP-approved age, we might not have the energy or the health to do all those things we yearned for in our thirties and forties.
Unfortunately, from the beginning of our lives until wherever you are in your life right now, we’re conditioned to think of the span of our lifetimes in no other terms. As philosopher Alan Watts said, “…we simply cheated ourselves a whole way down the line. We thought of life by analogy with a journey, with a pilgrimage which had a serious purpose at the end—the thing was to get to that end success or whatever it is or maybe heaven after you’re there.”
So, what is more important, the journey or the destination?
Neither, actually. Instead of life being a journey, it’s more of a song. Or a dance. “Music differs from travel,” said Watts. “When you travel, you’re trying to get somewhere. One doesn’t make the end of a composition the point of the composition. If that were so, the best conductors would be those who played the fastest. And there would be composers who wrote only finales…Same when dancing; you don’t aim at a particular spot in the room…the whole point of dancing is the dance.”
And while most of us are in a semi-lockdown state, we really have nothing to do except to dance. The pandemic, in fact, just might make this easier. How many of you have left your homes in the last few months and appreciated things you had previously ignored or taken for granted? The sun, the rain, the city or town you live in, take-out coffee.
Relax. Nothing is under control.
A recent study by two psychologists, Swiss and Dutch, respectively, on happiness concluded that one main key to achieving elation or joy is—wait for it—hedonism. The two academics didn’t necessarily mean for people to rush out to the nearest anything-goes orgy or to snort ample amounts of cocaine with a hundred dollar bill off of someone’s stomach
Instead, they advocated easing up on our self-control. The study revealed that those who let go of some self-control in their lives, giving themselves some slack, and allowing for more decadence—in the case of the study, “short-term pleasure”—were happier in life.
This is partly what Alan Watts called “the dance.” A life of prohibitive self-control is the journey in life, only to find out that when you finally get to point B, the destination is not as accessible as it once appeared. The dancefloor, though, has been here all along. You don’t even have to click your heels together three times and say, “there’s no place like now”—but if you do click your heels together, do it in a groovy danceable way.
We can transcend the messy state of the world simply by shifting the idea of our lives into a dance. And not a choreographed one but an impromptu boogie or a bunny hop or a breakdance. Let’s accept that we can’t envision the future right now. Let’s ease up on our self-control just a tad. Sadness is looking backward; anxiety is looking forward. Let’s try to practice doing neither. “The past is already gone, the future is not yet here,” said the Buddha. “There's only one moment for you to live, and that is the present moment.” Let’s take this disruptive moment and re-think the constructions in which our lives have been bound and explore different ways of looking at life.
Buddhist nun and author Pema Chödrön wrote, “It’s not impermanence per se, or even knowing we’re going to die, that is the cause of our suffering. Rather, it’s our resistance to the fundamental uncertainty of our situation. Our discomfort arises from all of our efforts to put ground under our feet, to realize our dream of constant okayness.”
What the pandemic has exposed is that the future was never really certain, even before we started hearing about this mysterious virus on the news in early 2020. It has rocked us out of our mundane quotidian lives and unveiled actual reality: the future is an illusion. The only thing we can actually be certain of is impermanence. And to celebrate uncertainty, impermanence, and dancing in the presence of life right now.
The last time I saw my dad he was at the destination—the end of the road, the terminus, the journey’s end—and he wanted me to know, from whatever wisdom he’d accrued in his 80 years—that maybe the voyage is not all that it’s cracked up to be. If there’s an afterlife, perhaps my dad occasionally tunes in to see what I’m doing. If so, he’ll see my dancing.
So, who wants to dance?