Life Is Not A Journey (Alan Watts)

I’ve always looked at life as a “journey”. Isn’t that what we’ve all been taught? But I’ve been wondering if this is in fact true. The idea of life being a “journey” can be problematic because it implies there is a destination and our focus shifts to that unknown destination rather than the process. The best way to see this is by looking at technology - it mainly looks for ways to save time. Also travel - first by foot, then horse, boat, car, plane and soon with virtual reality no travel will be needed at all. Bottom line: eliminating the journey is at the heart of what we call ‘progress’. But if you think of life as a piece of music or a dance, you no longer feel the need to ‘get somewhere’, you simply enjoy it 🙌🏻 When we say “life is a journey” (which means there is a destination), it makes sense to want to get there as fast as we can. But what if we got it wrong? What if life is NOT a journey? What if we’ve been using the wrong analogy? And what would happen if we changed the word ‘journey’ with ‘composition’ or ‘dance’ instead? Would we live our lives any differently? The past two years have been an eye opener for me. I realised that not only was I living my life in the future (a lot of what I was doing was for an uncertain future rather than the present), but also, I had this feeling I needed to “get somewhere”, only I didn’t know where that somewhere was and every time I got to what I thought was my destination, I was disappointed to find I felt exactly the same. Changing my perspective has really helped and I’m sharing this because it might help you too. You see, we live in a very competitive, fast paced world and it’s easy to get caught up in the ‘journey analogy’, with us all racing towards an unknown finish line. But I’m starting to think that maybe there is NO finish line and that maybe, just maybe, what we should all be doing is simply enjoy the ride/dance/music while it lasts? 🙌🏻 TAG A FRIEND ❤️ #love Life is Not A Journey by Alan Watts | Video by @tova_leigh | Footage by @cottonbro @romaodintsow @anastasia.shuraeva @rocketmann_team @ann.poan via @pexels | Track by Scott Dugdale