No Destination

Lately I’ve been thinking about the ways I delude myself. Some of my favorite pieces of writing explore self-delusion - from Joan Didion and Jia Tolentino and Eula Biss.

The most significant way I delude myself is believing that I will reach a point in life where everything will stay the same and I won’t have to cling so tightly what I know and have now.

This self-deception relies on the assumption that there is some end point, some destination I will arrive at where life will become less turbulent or un-changing.

What I value so deeply about my movement practice is that I am asked to consider having no endpoint. No destination. Just the journey. Ever-present and ever-changing. It’s also what I like so much about gardening. These are simply practices of meeting myself. Meeting my body and my breath exacty as I am in this moment. And seeing the world as it is in this moment. A rose will bloom; it then will fade.

And then, in the next second, I shift. And the world shifts. And something new is revealed: a new facet of myself, of another, of a situation, past or present.

Identifying and naming this self-delusion helps to fade its potency. Rather than waiting to arrive at some stable point in time, I’m trying to to embrace the ever-changing present.