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Our Universal Journey

A cat with an incurable kind of cancer. A job that is always tenuous. Human relationships that are fragile, unpredictable, and sometimes tumultuous. My own body, seemingly healthy- but still subject to disease, fatigue, and aging.

Life is unpredictable. However much we think we have a handle on it, the truth is we never really know what’s to come. Everything can change in an instant. This is a tough truth to accept, for though we know intellectually that all things in life are impermanent, we often don’t feel it instinctively.

We persist in our attempts to control life. We imagine that we can predict and manipulate future events. We imagine that we control, or at least have a strong influence on, external events.

But this is not really the case. In fact, all that worry, manipulation, and attempted control is mostly wasted energy. We are not the masters of the external world. We cannot predict the future. Our best laid plans are always subject to catastrophic failure.

There is no security to be found in the outside world. There is no secure job, or relationship, or situation of any kind. Everything changes. We can, conceivably, lose them all in the blink of an eye. Where then is true security to be found? Certainly not in the external world, but rather, internally.

“Trust yourself to react appropriately when catastrophe happens. Failure of nerve is really failure to trust yourself.” – Alan Watts

This is the only true security- the security of trusting yourself, the security of flexibility and adaptability, the security of spiritual and emotional self-reliance. Rather than obsess over external events, we better serve ourselves by obsessing over our inner resources.

Our security and happiness come from our inner peace, our ability to accept any situation, adapt to it, use it, learn from it, and, perhaps, overcome it.

The more we do this, the more confident we grow and, in time, we develop a true sense of security in our lives… one that is completely independent of external circumstances. Practically, this implies that our task is to seek out new experiences and build our capacity to adapt to them.

This is the reason I think of travel as a potentially spiritual practice. Travel, especially long, challenging journeys expands our ability to accept and adapt to the unexpected and the unknown. This kind of travel is a concentrated training exercise in impermanence and change.

Joseph Campbell, the famed mythologist, identified the common thread running through the mythological journeys found in most cultures. He noted that while these stories are always presented as external journeys, they are in fact symbolic of the inner journey we must all make.

In the end, we must all leave home, the safe and comfortable. We must all face life-changing challenges, we must all face loss, and we must all arrive at our own understanding of impermanence, and our own wisdom. This is the universal journey.