This Too Is Part of Your Journey

We often think life should be like the trip we plan where everything is accounted for and everything runs smoothly and is executed perfectly.  Life is rarely like that.  Life is like the trip where your plane gets delayed and then canceled and you are sleeping in the airport.  Where you arrive at your beach destination and it rains all week.  Where you get Montezuma’s revenge from eating from a street vendor.  

But life is also the person you met while stuck in the airport who you had a life-changing conversation with.  It’s the monkeys you saw swinging through the trees from your balcony while it was raining.  It’s the person you love taking care of you while you were sick.

If life were the perfectly planned, smooth journey we wish it would be, there is so much we would miss.  And we would end up being the same people we were in the beginning because we would never have to learn and grow from the imperfect times.

I used to be scared, and a little angry, whenever someone told me life was a journey.  I wanted it to be a destination.  A place where I learned all the things I needed to learn and then got to the ultimate place where everything was stable and okay.  And every time something challenging would come up in life, I would get frustrated and think, “Really?  This again?!?  I was good, why can’t I just stay that way?”

What I realize now is that the journey of life keeps going, no matter how much good you do, no matter how much you have figured out, no matter how secure you create your life to be.  While I used to think my “goal” was getting to the destination, now I realize my challenge is in getting comfortable with the journey.  I’ve discovered that the better I know myself, the more I work with my own wiring, the more I pause and appreciate the random airport conversations and the monkeys in the rain, the more comfortable I get with the journey.  And the more I truly enjoy this life I live.