It's hard to put a timing on this one, because the grasping of the true nature of Life is a gradual process - well, it was for me anyway. It probably crept up on me somewhere in the period from age 35 to age 55, the understanding that life isn't a Destination but a Journey, first proposed by some insightful caveman I'm sure but made popular by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
When I was 15 my goal of life was to acquire something on wheels with an engine of a reasonable displacement. Without conceptualising it I'm sure I thought this was my Destination - a MAC Velocette or an MG TC, whichever came first. I wasn't all that picky. By the time I'd been through 2 motorbikes and a car I was 18 and I thought my goal was to be Ernest Hemingway incarnate.
By the time I was 25 I was sort of grown up and thought my goal was to get the best paying career I could cobble together from my scarce talents and pay off the house mortgage and the car and the dining room suite with enough left over each fortnight to keep the kids fed and in shoes. That was the Destination. All the while not appreciating the physical, intellectual, and spiritual countryside I was constantly passing through. I don't think I ever stopped to smell the roses. Too much hard work to be done. Clock ticking.
By the time I was 35 I'd been through 10 jobs from milking cows to machining high performance camshafts and none of them had turned into a fat salary but geez they'd supplied me with a heap of priceless material that would one day become writing that would earn me not a lot. But by then I'd fallen sideways into Accounting and the Wine Industry and at last a true career was on its way, one that would last for 30 years and pay for everything we ever wanted with a decent bunch left over to keep us warm in old age.
The thing is, it was only in midlife when I started to write things down that it began to dawn on me, about The Journey. No eureka moment mind you, but a slow germination of understanding, of where I had been for those 35 years, where I was by then, and that therefore there would be - God and Fate and Luck and good vintages willing - still a long way to go.
So now, sitting here 45 years later, at no Destination at all, and looking back more than looking forward, which is as it should be, I can see it for what it is - The Journey of a Lifetime - a journey through family and time and people and places and experiences. All of which is bundled up here in this head, but leaving me with that most eternal of questions - WHY? Why do we have this journey? What is the point of it? IF there's a cosmic plan, what is this journey meant to achieve? The making of a wiser person? Hard to come up with any other answer, eh? This is now surely going to keep me awake for a few nights. How about you?
Cheers....
T.R.E.
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