Time and Destination and The Act of Being Lost

Finding the way through a place is all about continuation, not destination. It's not about knowing where you want to end up but instead knowing how to go from where you are to the next place you need to be in order to, eventually though not inevitably, reach your destination.

You're in a strange town in a strange country. You have an address but no maps and no knowledge of the way the town is splayed out over the rough mountainous farmland surrounding you. You'd be able to recognize the place once you got to it by the address tacked to the stuccoed wall but not before. What do you do? Besides ask for help and a map, what could you possibly do? You could drive every street, looking for patterns in the foreign street names. Or you could give up. The point is, without reference points and a common language, without knowing what turn to take next and what landmark to mark next, finding your way through a place isn't so much an act of looking for something as it is an act of being lost.

But being lost isn’t so bad as we make it out to be. Being lost is a temporary state we inhabit. And if we think about it long enough, we find that we’re lost most of our waking hours. We’re never quite sure what we’ll do next or where we’ll go because we’re not sure what will show up in our path, what will ambush us, what will inconvenience us, what will surprise or pain or delight us. Even when sleeping we’re lost. Lost between the sunset of one day and the sunrise of another. Lost in our own heads with no grasp of time. Lost in the muddle of thoughts and images that will make no sense after we wake up but that drive along very believable stories while we sleep.

We can—we must—plan and anticipate and grow fond of and anxious for events that haven’t happened yet, but there’s a phrase that rings more true than almost any other I know: Time will tell. And it does tell. Time tells everything. It tells us that we are born and live and die, and that so does everyone else. It tells us what is sure and what is not. What will fail and what will thrive. Who will be worth our time and who will not. In the very, very end, time will be the only one left, and he or she or it will tell the story that no one will be around to tell, the story of the end.

But the point isn’t to dwell on time’s inevitable conquering of the universe. The point is that we inhabit time and we furtively try to control it. We try to reach goals and destinations without realizing that we spend nearly every moment of our lives in the in-between, before winning or loosing, after waking, before sleeping, after setting out but before reaching the end. And if that’s where we find ourselves, isn’t that where we should learn to be happy? We should embrace this wicked, mortal home of ours and furnish it with the decorations that will make us happy and help us tell our own stories, our own way, in our own time—though we really don’t ever have time. Time has us.

So when someone tells you that it's not about the destination, it's about the journey, don't brush off the idea as though it were an annoying burr stuck in your sweater. Leave it there and look at it. Understand that the hardship is in the journey, the looking and getting lost and feeling alone. But so is the joy and the pleasure, the surprise of finding a quiet place to stop and smell roses, the chance to see something old in a new way, the road that is usually rough but sometimes glittering in the light of a dying sun. We are all on a journey. We are all lost. We are all captives of time. If we weren’t, we wouldn’t be alive enough to tell our story.