Enjoying the journey

My view, arrived at rather late in life I suspect, is that everything should be about enjoying the journey rather than being pre-occupied by the destination.

It is my observation that targets to be reached and achievements required mean that the here and now and its beauty or enigmatic simplicity or moment in time gets ignored and passed by as we are target driven.

When considering this ahead of writing this article I was horrified to conclude that I am probably exhibiting what used to be labelled ‘hippie qualities’.  This added to a recent conversation with a gentleman who innocently said, “Ah Chris I bet you’d love to work on a huge Pink Floyd gig,” to really annoy me.  I am guilty of neither charge!  I think. I hope.

But, I do find myself drifting, or maybe that should be described as ‘cruising gently’ through my latter years of life without any target or destination to aim for.  I’m happy and this is probably a lot to do with having late in life discovered a really wonderful person to be cast adrift with, but I also find that analysing why distracts from enjoying the journey.

In effect, I just am.  I’m just here and looking around I see and enjoy stuff.

In my daily life I am mainly surrounded by so many young people.  They don’t seem to be able to savour the moment, and they spend a lot of time saying they feel stressed, wound-up, miserable, and disappointed. Maybe that’s all part of an immaturity.

Maybe I’m now, er, ‘mature’.  Hmmm.  I’ll consider that another time.

Anyway, enjoying the journey is something I believe can also be applied to walking.  All too often people walk to somewhere.  They focus on that somewhere and walk past wonderment oblivious to its existence.

So, to the point:  It gave me great pleasure to read a posting on Steve Conway‘s fine blog about what he’d seen along the way whilst walking.  He, very sensibly, walks for his health, fitness and well-being.  This, I might add with a certain quantity of ‘Steve Conway envy’, seems to be doing him a lot of good.  In the post, he admits to originally being cynical or dismissive of ‘enjoying the journey’, and so the entire post is full of the wonderment of the things he has enjoyed on the journey rather than the destinations.

Steve is a proper wordsmith.  He’s written books and stuff.  This means he is able to find the right ones to describe aspects of those things that helped him enjoy the journey.  And of course, he uses photos he takes along the way.  Photos that share the wonderment of those things that helped him enjoy the journey.

Indeed, the photo at the top of this article I stole from him includes one of those weird things one finds. “Think Forbidden” the cordoning tape pictured says.  You’ll see what it really says when you read Steve’s blog, but only by enjoying the journey does one realise that such gems exist.

I spent a good few minutes enjoying the journey of reading Steve’s post and absorbing the pictures.  I hope you will too by going here.