Our Pilgrimage

“When you’re on a journey, and the end keeps getting further and further away, then you realize that the real end is the journey”– Joseph Campbell

“Are we there yet?” is a common question that one hears when you take a road trip with children. Many children do not have the patience to take a long car ride to get to where they are going and will repeat the dreaded “Are we there yet?” many times during the course of a trip. They simply want to get to where they are going and don’t have much fun sitting in the backseat, nor do they have much appreciation of space and time.

We don’t hear too many adults ask the question aloud “Are we there yet?”, however most people are asking that very question in their minds all of the time.

Generally we are not much different from the child on a trip, we know where we want to go and we want to be there now. We, like a child do not have much patience or understanding of space and time. We often fail to understand that rather than being on finite trip, we are on a journey, a pilgrimage if you will. This pilgrimage that we are on does not come with a defined map; it does not come with a GPS to provide us the shortest route or the route with the most Starbucks on the way.

The beauty of being on a pilgrimage is that we are not constrained by time and space, we don’t have to get to a predetermined designation and we don’t have to take the shortest route. Unlike taking a trip to visit Grand mom, we do not necessarily benefit from taking the shortest route. As a matter of fact, when we try to take the shortest route, when we attempt to take short cuts we actually do a disservice to ourselves because we miss so much along the way. The beauty of a pilgrimage is that we are able to take whatever routes we desire, we will go forward, we will go up hills and down hills, we will curve and swerve and crisscross paths, we can take detours, heck we may even go backwards at times to visit something again (re-learn a lesson).

When we accept that we are on a pilgrimage and not a finite trip, then we begin to experience a freedom, a freedom of acceptance that provides us an understanding that there is no “one way”, that in fact there are infinite ways to go. We grow to understand that with the freedom to go our way on our pilgrimage that we are not shackled by accepted conventional rights and wrongs and that we are free beings who have the ability to experience that which comes our way in our own way.

In fact the moment we believe we have arrived or that we are on the one “right” path is the moment that our pilgrimage, our journey has come to a stall. It is at this point that we must be aware that it is time to open our minds and our hearts again to re-energize our pilgrimage.

As Joseph Campbell so pointedly stated, “the real end is our journey”, that is, it is never about the designation, it is always about the journey.

This is always true for me, even for something as simple as having a meal, it is never about the food, it is always about whom I share that meal with. The best trips I have taken in my life are never about the trip itself, it is about whom I shared the trip with, who I met along the way, etc. The same is true about my spiritual journey/pilgrimage it is never about where I am going; it is always about the experiences along the way!