The Journey

Its about the journey, not the destination… or is it?

I like to travel. Walking, biking, riding, flying… if there’s a place to go, I’d like to get there. I’ll take all modes. Planes, trains and automobiles.  Books, music, festivals. Its not just the physical journey, but the spiritual, intellectual, physical movement into new places, new realms, new ideas, new states of being. But as much as  I love the open road, the feeling of knowing I’m going to a new place and doing a new thing, how do I feel about the actual Journey?

I am obsessed with arriving. Being there, the elusive there of the future.

I am an anxious and wrestles person, if not by nature, then by upbringing. I am always 2 steps ahead of most people and at least 1 step ahead of myself, envisioning everything that could and should happen, good or bad. I don’t like to wait, I make things happen, and due to my anxiety, have a way of manifesting the outcome (good or bad) that I have obsessed over. So, by the time I get to any one  destination, I am thinking about the destination just around the corner.  Its like wanderlust on speed.

Two years ago I got a glimpse of how serious my obsession with arriving is. I was going to New Orleans on a service trip. The flight was rough, turbulence pushing us across the South. Being anxious as I am, I was sure that we were going to die. A group of do-gooders trekking to New Orleans to paint a house, dead on a plane that crash lands in a cornfield all due to turbulence. I nearly started writing goodbye notes, and stopped when  I realized they would burn. When we didn’t die on the plane, I was sure that we would die on the drive to where we would be staying. We rode in a 14 passenger van, so much luggage you couldn’t see out of the back or move. We hit the dusty Louisiana  road, all the way to Marrero, Louisiana. Marrero, I thought. Surely a town where blacks would be lynched. I was anxious, and too wrestles to sit still in the car. I threw up as soon as I got out.

It didn’t help that when we got to where we would be staying, it was an abandoned orphanage, replete with a graveyard in front. What the hell kind of journey was this? Worse, what kind of destination. Trying to get closer to myself, I left my cell phone in LA. I had no one to call to share my anxious thoughts, which were on hyper-drive at this time. I needed to know everything, and for every problem, and every possible problem, (including but not limited to: being murdered by homeless vagrants, eaten by swamp alligators, falling down a dark stair well and just dying). This journey was no longer romantic.

Louisiana is a sleepy place, it forces you to slow down. In the end, with good music, good people and Everclear, I was able to rest enough to focus on the journey. But that was a vacation, and here we are in real life. Though I take some of the calmness of Louisiana with me, I’m still not sure how I feel about my journey, my destination points, and where the rest stops are. What about you?