There Is No Destination
People often try to “get somewhere,” to live up to some “ideal,” or to wait for a bad situation to end so they can say they’re fine. The destination they hope to reach—their personal “Ithaka”—is often the source of a lot of suffering they inflict on themselves.
Even though having goals is important for growth, the idea of an ideal can turn into a powerful force whose job seems to be to keep us in a state of impatience, stirring feelings of low self-worth and fear and pulling us away from the present.
How we create false ideals
We live at a time when access to knowledge and information is greater than ever, which can create a fixed picture of how life “should” be. We learn to want what looks attractive, comfortable and abundant.
The way we judge our needs and goals can be so distorted that it might be called little more than imitation. We seem to want what someone else has simply because their overall picture appears to include something we feel we’re missing. So we copy them, hoping that if we follow their steps we’ll become like what impresses us.
Self-knowledge as the foundation for life
When any real sense of self-knowledge is missing, life can feel empty. We haven’t learned to know what we want or to know ourselves. We’ve only learned to want what impresses us because it seems to make someone else happy. So we set up an ideal that we each define as the ultimate for ourselves, and that gives us the idea of a destination.
A mistaken picture of the ideal life can have many negative effects. A central one is that we never quite seem to understand what’s wrong with us. That happens because we put ourselves in conflict between who we are and who we think we should be.
The image of the perfect life as a source of inner conflict
Besides the wrong image of the perfect life we may carry, the belief that there is a state we must reach before we can be “fine” can have serious consequences, if only because we automatically reject the now. We cancel the life we’re living and keep waiting to arrive somewhere. It’s also very common to make our personal Ithaka so hard to reach yet so alluring and perfect simply to justify the numbness and procrastination we don’t like to face.
We set false milestones for when we’ll “start living,” while we stay stuck in inner conflict—often driven by fear, whether it’s based on past experiences we’re afraid will repeat or is largely imaginary and comes from the subconscious.
Our greatest enemy is ourselves
There is no single perfect thing we must acquire, and no imaginary utopia we must live in. We ourselves are enough. We don’t need to become “like him” or “like her” to be happy, to be respected or accepted. We need to accept ourselves and our own story—and to face our greatest enemy, the one we see every day in the mirror.
Letting go of the idea of a destination can free us from the insecurity, anxiety and sadness that come when we feel we haven’t “arrived.” The idea of a destination should not be confused with having goals; rather, it’s a problematic state we tend to rationalize, which keeps us in constant waiting—because it can feel easier to always be waiting for something—and that leads to rejecting ourselves and letting life simply pass us by.
So there is no “Ithaka” we have to reach; we are already living the greatest wonder, which is existence itself. Let’s make conscious choices so that the life we live is what we truly want—and perhaps one day we’ll see the beauty of simplicity and that we are the source of both our happiness and our unhappiness.
For more on living in the present and finding balance, read our articles Happiness as an Absolute Goal and Dream, Hope, Take Risks. To explore how to take charge of change, see Don’t Be Afraid to Change Your Life.
Happy Life Team
