WiseIdiot Quotes – The journey of a thousand miles…

WiseIdiot Quotes – The journey of a thousand miles…. begins with a bad punchline.

More often than not, we set off on journeys with set goals in mind. What we don’t realise is that these journeys change as we pass through life. We see, hear and feel new experiences that stretch us and push our mind, body and soul in new directions.

Usually, we land up in places and positions that were not our original goal and even if they are, the point of accomplishing the goal does not have the relish and sense of accomplishment that we had thought it would have.

We cling to wise words and advice of people who had made similar journeys – forgetting that each person is different. What moved that individual to move a mountain may break us. What broke them may spur us to redouble our efforts. Clinging to their words as sacrosanct usually turns us into someone we do not recognise. We stop feeling or thinking like we used to. And we wonder where we went wrong.

Not all change is bad. Some change is natural and should happen but most are deviations we have taken with full knowledge and awareness because someone we know or admire made a similar journey and we decided it best to use that as a marker of our own progress.

The idea should be to continue what Lao Tzu said of a journey beginning with a single step with the additional realisation that each new step we take pushes us into a new journey. We can stop after taking a single step or after 10 or 1,000. It matters not how many steps we took but how much we like being where we are. If we like where we are, then our journey is already at an end – even before we started. And that is a good thing.

What we need to do is to stop comparing ourselves to heroes who took longer or different paths. As the wise old saying goes, one cannot compare apples to oranges.

Time we realise that and take steps that we want to rather than those we think we have to.