The Journey – When Getting Somewhere Keeps Us Trapped

“Breathing in, we make three steps, and we may tell ourselves with each step, “I have arrived. I have arrived. I have arrived.” And breathing out, we make another three steps, always mindful of the contact between our feet and the ground, and we say, “I’m home. I’m home. I’m home.”

Thich Nhat Hanh

The art of living can be profoundly simple, and yet it’s not easy. Even before our waking consciousness emerges here as young children, we are energetically programmed by the stress signals of our environment. Deep within the formless awareness of our mother’s womb, stress chemicals in response to stimuli were already forming our experience of physical life. In the background to these sentient events, was an undertone of dis-ease within the whole: a resistance to being here, human; a repression of life-force; a constant sense of expectation towards the fulfillment that will come in the future; a nasal resonance of fear around the worst that could happen. It’s all in the experiential atmosphere, at the experiential core, to the baby in formation.

Later, this is affirmed. The emphasis on the future disaster pitted against the future fulfillment is programmed into thought forms of crime-punishment,  good behavior-reward, in a manner that it appears inseparable from ‘reality’.

Born into the living environment, the message comes from our parents, it’s given through our teachers, it’s sanctified by the promise or condemnation of religion, and it’s embodied through the raw threat of financial survival. It impregnates our most intimate relationships, our freedom to manifest and even our self-honesty in being able to connect to our own inner source. It numbs the senses, disconnects us from life and propagates illusion.

Like donkeys bashed with a stick from behind and following a carrot that never gets closer, we move forward with increasing despair. Between the “It might never happen” of the collapse of dreams and the reassuring “It might never happen” collapse of nightmares, we falter, experiencing the present moment as senseless. Yet, more than most humans, the donkey was always free.

Maybe I’ll never make it to the moon.

Yes, 47 years after someone first stepped on the moon, we all seem to be waiting for our personal Apollo Moment. We’re waiting for the present moment – the only window through which life could ever fulfill us. We’re waiting for it to be “Now”. We’re denying the life rushing through our veins, to the dazzling light of our minds, the unconfined miracle of the foot on the ground, for the Now that will come ‘later’: the moment in which it all suddenly makes sense. We deny our physical senses – our incredible potential in sensitivity – for the sake of a “sense” that can only emerge through direct experience in this moment, as there is no “other” moment.

And so we continue on this imagined journey, laden with goods and imagined responsibilities, fearful we’ll take a wrong turn and fall into a ditch, yet knowing that anyway, sooner or later, we’ll take our last step and the ditch will be here. Senseless indeed.

We look back fearfully towards where we have been, clutching at the highlights of the way – even trying to repeat them – and denying the parts that seem to threaten the way ahead. We look fearfully ahead and agonize about choices of turning left or right. On the left is the pot of gold, to the right could be Satan himself. We don’t know, and always, whether we turn left or right, the sun beats down on our back, as if it really doesn’t matter. Senseless indeed.

The very concept of beginnings endings, initiations and arrivals is built on time – past, present and future. The very sense of destination is built on physical space – the nowhere, everywhere and somewhere.

The actor in these parameters of time and space is you: but who are you? Are you the one that is moving? Or are you always still, whether the feet move quickly or slowly? Are you everything you see emerging in your consciousness, or are you none of that, not even conscious at all?

As the donkey moves forward, anyway tempted and punished by the master of karma and previous generations, there is another map, and a deeper destiny. The two great arches of the ‘here’ and the ‘now’, boundless space and timelessness, stand deep within the living body as gateways to freedom.

Each step arriving. Each step kissing the earth. Each step ultimately fulfilled.