The destination or the experience?

“I fail to get even the attention of the mass. I should suit them better if I suited myself less. I feel that the public demand an average man,–average thoughts and manners,–not originality, nor even absolute excellence. You cannot interest them except as you are like them and sympathize with them. I would rather that my audience come to me than that I should go to them, and so they be sifted.”

-Thoreau

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What is it that we’re seeking in this life? Love, family, money and comfort, success, God? My answer is that we shouldn’t think that we’re put on Earth to search for anything. It makes no logical sense to believe that we should be searching. And yet, humanity, in its entirety, is, in some regards, sucked in to this conviction. But allow me to break it down and show the dislogic. The belief is that we are put on Earth for a purpose that, once discovered, will give us true happiness. Constant joy. However, if this is the true meaning of life, than what happens when your “purpose” is “discovered?” If it’s your reason to live, than shouldn’t you die once it’s found? Stop living? Because, in essence, this means that the destination is the important aspect to life. Not the journey. Right?

My point is that because we don’t (at least the greater majority of us) choose when we get to die, even when the “purpose” is supposedly found, life continues… thus, the journey continues and soon thereafter, the “purpose” is realized as yet another trail head on the winding hike; a nondestination; in fact, a commencement for yet another journey.

It is an illusion that society has conditioned us to feed and cultivate. And it is this conditioning, this need to cultivate, this concept that is the actual cause of our constant suffering; continuous dishappiness NOT continuous happiness because we will continually search and be duped. Over and over again.

So. This is where I make my argument that there is not necessarily a “purpose” or a “destination” that we should look forward to. Instead, the best we can do for ourselves is to consider the present moment, the present experience. Allow yourself to feel the Now because it is the journey, the winding hike and every trail head that is the vital aspect to life and our ultimate end (death). With this, the ride is more important than the destination. For we can never know what we are destined to, and in any case, without the journey, there is no destination.