“It is the journey itself that makes up a life. Only when you understand this will you understand the meaning of wisdom.” (Neptune to Odysseus in Homer, The Odyssey)
I like freewriting. Something about it makes me feel like Huckleberry Finn on his raft, floating down the meandering Mississippi under the lazy summer sun. I have all the time in the world to reach a destination – that is, if I choose to. Or I could continue onward, impeded by nothing but the limits of my own imagination. Life, like freewriting, is a journey. Or, as Neptune told Odysseus, “It is the journey itself that makes up a life.” Why be impatient to find an end, even if there is one?
Some people take life in stages; they premeditate every leg of their journey and miss out on nearly everything that’s important. They get so caught up with delays and deadlines that they never realize that life is the road they travel, not the place they’re going. Living with the end in mind results in no life at all. For example, Jay Gatsby from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby works his way up from humble beginnings with a single purpose ingrained in his mind: to win the heart of the girl he loves. He focuses his entire life on this single goal and is so caught up with his obsession that he forgets to actually live. In the end, Daisy rejects him and he meets an untimely demise at the gunpoint of a man warped by grief. To salt the wounds of Gatsby’s existence, almost no one shows up at his funeral – it was as if he were dead even when he was technically alive.
If we take a life in a literal sense and cut it down to some smaller scale, say, a road trip, we can further explore what it means to live. A road trip may seem superficially to have one major purpose – to reach the desired destination. But following this purpose exactly will result in a miserable little excursion with complaining children (“are we there yet?”) and unhappy experiences with directions (“honey, I think we’re lost again…”). In the same sense, a person who lives simply to get to the end (death?) is probably in for a pathetic life. Like the poor carload of whining children and bewildered parents, these people tie their entire trip into a knot of wretchedness and never really experience all the wonders that this earth has to offer. In order to really enjoy a road trip, a vacationer has to make the most out of everything. He savors the passing scenery, even though some of the buildings and trees and bridges whirl by and he never sees them again. They are like the people that pass in and out of his life. He knows it cannot last forever – that it is ephemeral, like any good thing, but at least he recognizes its value and makes it a part of himself so he is richer for it.
A few summers ago, I discovered a delightful little book – The Wild Road by Gabriel King. While not a very popular novel, it had something that many contemporary bestsellers lack – it had vivacity spilling out from each page. Its characters’ sheer enthusiasm for life was enough to light the plot up into a brilliant tapestry. The book discussed the question of identity and what made a person (or in the story’s case, a cat) what he or she is. It settled on a wise answer: his or her experiences. Its characters were vagrants, masters of the “wild roads,” the pathways that were rich with those who took them. These characters had little more than their experiences, but it was enough, and maybe they were better off than humans because of it. These characters had no worldly attachments, lived without quotas, and noted sadly that humans lack life because of humanity’s inability to divorce itself from fixation on the material obsessions. These characters had stories to tell, and what is a story without a journey of some sort? Lives are woven from these journeys.
Not only does a person’s life consist of journeys, but his death is at their end. A person who lives simply to get to the end is probably one wishing for death or maybe cryogenic freezing. Characters in books are the same, even if their “death” is involuntary. Every good tale has within it an expedition, whether it is a literal or metaphorical one. It may involve a band of questing travelers ranging their fantastic country as in The Lord of the Rings or the desperate migration of the Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath. It may even discuss an odyssey of mental growth and development, like that of Scout’s in To Kill a Mockingbird. This journey is what gives the story its life and its plot. It provides the author with the opportunity to flesh out details, develop characters, and make his or her world of words more believable. When the characters reach the end, a curtain snaps down on their lives, sealing them forever from the reader. Then they are as good as deceased, for we can never know more about them unless the author chooses to give them a second life in the voyage of a sequel.
It amazes me how people pass by the best things in life without a second glance. A man may die wealthy, but he may also never know the smell of a watermelon sliced open in the heat of summer or the clean fresh start of new snow. It’s the small things that give shape to a life and take it out of two-dimensional flatness into the reality of our four-dimensional world. Anyone would be a fool not to realize this, but many still continue to ignore the pathways around them in lieu of something they can hold in their hands. What’s a paycheck compared to a quiet summer evening? How can the stimulation of a bank account measure up to the stimulation of a soul? As long as someone keeps learning and exploring with his senses or soul or even both, he is alive. As long as he recognizes the secret promises of a road winding into the horizon, he lives. Once he forsakes the journeys life offers him, he has no more vitality than a machine. He’s traded everything… for nothing.
Rebuttal
“Men live by positive goals, individual and collective, a vast variety of them, seldom predictable, at times incompatible.” (Sir Isiah Berlin, Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century)
- People need structure in their lives to get anything done.
- If people keep digressing from the focus of their lives, they will never actually accomplish anything.
- A good society is a well-ordered one.
- Idealism never got anything done.
- It’s the results that matter. History never remembers the what-ifs.
- To live without goals is to live without purpose. To live without purpose is like not living at all.
- Fail to plan and plan to fail.