Becoming a world traveler
My desire to explore this world of ours started young. I suspect its seed was within the stacks of books that I lugged home from the library every week. I don’t know how else a little girl in Houston, Texas would have developed the certainty that it was possible to pass beyond the horizons of her beloved neighborhood to visit deserts and oceans, the Eifel Tower and the Taj Mahal, the lighthouses of Maine and the Hollywood sign.
I took my first real journey at sixteen. My friend, Melissa, had moved with her family to Brussels, Belgium the year before. Before she even left, I began saving every dollar I earned from babysitting so that I could buy a plane ticket to Europe. My journal from that trip is filled with exclamation points and awe. Amsterdam! Paris! London! A ten-day whirlwind that foreshadowed the pace of the future trips I would plan.
Becoming a spiritual traveler
It’s perhaps not surprising that this would be the same pace at which I embarked on my spiritual journey. At 35, I awakened with a start to a deep ache inside that there was more to this life of mine and I was desperately afraid that I was missing it. I dove headlong into yoga at the same time that I plunged into the community at our new church.
I remember the haste of my searching. I was up before the sun, devouring my daily reading, scratching furiously in my journals, and unrolling my yoga mat. Rather than seeking new places to explore, I was seeking a new or transformed me. I couldn’t wait to get “there!” I couldn’t wait to get past the horizon of now to see what this new me was like and what she would do!
Slow down. You’re moving too fast.
Though my passion for this inward journey of mine hasn’t changed any more than my zeal to experience more of this world, my sense of urgency to “get there” has ebbed. The following words from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit, paleontologist and teacher, capture the essence of this somewhat surprising inner shift.
Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient to be on the way
to something unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability –
and that it may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually – let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
– “Patient Trust” from a letter to Marguerite Teilhard-Chambon, July 4, 1915
Just as rushing through four countries in ten days can be exciting but, in hindsight, may not be the best way to savor what you are seeing and learning, there is no need to hurry the spiritual journey of becoming. There is no need to worry about missing the deeper meaning of your days, unless, that is, you are dashing pell-mell toward your next day.
The journey is more important than the destination
When traveling, being on your way to your destination is a prelude to the big event – soaking in the experience of being somewhere else you’ve never been, being astonished by seeing in the real world what you’d only seen in photos, allowing yourself to be changed by placing yourself in an entirely new environment. Getting yourself where you’re going can often be a step you’d prefer to skip.
As a passionate “traveler” in both senses, I know that this is simply not true with an inner journey. As Teilhard de Chardin writes, the law of all progress is that it is made by passing through. Without the, at times irritating, intermediary stage of right now, I simply cannot get to whatever is next. And, just as there is no way that I could have been who I am now in the rather frantic early days of my seeking, I cannot be now who I will become as I continue along the way.
The best part of the inward journey is that, as much as you yearn to “get there,” you can’t get there without being where you are right now. It is only by being here and now that you can grow; that you can take shape. If you journey without haste and with patient trust, your arrival at every next step along the way will be even sweeter than your arrival at whatever global destination you choose next.
Bon voyage.
In sutras 2.12-2.14, Patanjali teaches that we need to practice steadily while letting go of any and all preconceived notions of what the practice will do for us, how it will change us, and of who we will become because of it. Almost as if talking to an eager, somewhat hurried student like me, he says, “this is going to take a while. This is not about getting there. It’s about the journey. Enjoy it.”