You Have Reached Your Destination

Many of you will be able to actually hear the GPS system’s voice in your head when you read the words: “You have reached your destination!”

As the incredibly geographically challenged but quite resourceful individual I like to think I am, I rely on my car’s GPS system to help me get where I need to go. And I had a doctor’s appointment a while ago, and darned if she didn’t move her office to a new location in the year since I’d seen her last.

So, I enter in the new address and I go off on my merry way. All is going great for about 30 minutes until I’m driving down a road I’m only somewhat familiar with and I hear my GPS cheerfully announce to me (with nary an office building in sight mind you)

“You have reached your destination!”

Now What?!

As Yogi Berra once said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you might wind up somewhere else.” Yogi Berra was a genius.

I didn’t know where I was going, my GPS system told me I was there, except there was no “there” there…

I think Gertrude Stein said that once. See, I’m hardly the only one who gets lost!

I once was lost…

“Not all those who wander are lost.”

~J.R.R. Tolkien

I eventually realized my trusty GPS wasn’t really “wrong” and I was actually close to my doctor’s office…on the other side of a divided highway that I had to u-turn to get back to. It was no problem once I started looking around with my own eyes to locate things. But this experience of being told I had reached my destination when my destination was nowhere in sight actually hit me like a punch in the stomach that said “Hey, you, wake up and realize this is important.”

…but now I found something!

This is life. This is a lot like life. This is my life.

I’m getting up and going through my days and doing a whole lot of things, setting a lot of goals, believing in a lot of stuff that I do… often with my eyes set firmly on a line set out in the distance… a horizon that I may someday reach, but not now.

If Not Now, Then When?

But why not now? I practice mindfulness to be more aware of what is happening and what I am feeling in the moment. But that feels like the micro to this macro.

Life can not only be a journey, life is the destination. The pursuit of anything important doesn’t have to have an “ending” on that horizon… the pursuit can be the destination. I don’t have to have seen my last client to have reached my destination. I don’t have to have written my last blog post. I don’t have to get my daughter off to college or anything else in order to “get there.”

I am there. You are there. We are there. Wherever “there” is.

We have reached our destination! : )

Dr. Anita Sanz, PhD, Psychologist