The Journey is the Destination

So, I’m not a particularly philosophical person - while I think a lot about things, I’m not usually looking for deeper meanings or overarching philosophical angles. But this transition to a new way of life has generated a lot of introspection into what is important to me and how I want to live my life going forward.

One interesting change in the way we approach things is that we’ve realized we don’t need to be efficient in our use of time. I’m used to planning vacations very carefully in order not to “waste” any time and try very hard not to choose activities that could be a “fail” because can’t have any “bad” experiences during our short vacation times.

Now, first, we are NOT on vacation (I really need to stop eating like I’m on vacation). And, we have time to enjoy simply getting there and taking the chance on having some fails. As a consequence, we’re also not spending as much time planning, which is actually nice. The new operating procedure is that we might do a quick search the day before going somewhere and come up with some things that we might want to do, not check too many reviews to validate and then just pick some when we get up the next morning. Sometimes that works well, sometimes not so much.

We had a fail this week - the state park we went to was ugly, the trails poorly maintained, it was way far off the beaten path, and the drive was not so great. It was the first real fail we’ve had (I don’t count my boulder scrambling issues, because that all ended up fine - no falling or bruises or anything 😜) and we “wasted” half a day on it. As we were driving away, we kind of both looked at each other and said “ice cream?” We’ve been seeing and resisting the very, very many great looking ice cream places all over Maine, but this seemed like the moment to indulge.

Craig found Wicked Good Ice Cream online and it was only a little out of our way, with amazing sounding flavors.

The outcome - not only was the ice cream wicked good, but magically it was located right next to this great little beach:

The day was saved by ice cream!

Well no, it was saved by us enjoying our journey - we’ve had really good luck with unplanned diversions and finding the joy in them. I’m not sure where I first heard it, but I think my new mantra is “The Journey is the Destination” to remind myself that getting there can be just as fun and I need to enjoy the simple things too.

So, of course, I had to look it up - “It's not the destination, it's the journey” is a quote attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Don’t forget to enjoy the journey!