A road without a goal

I do not know about you, but in recent weeks I have sometimes been overcome by gloom: there seems to be so much division and so little willingness to listen to each other. Words are twisted when it suits them, and honesty and the common good lose out to the result and self-interest. What effort would I make for a pilgrimage tradition around connection and deepening, rest and contemplation?

When I think like that, inspiration escapes me and I fall silent. I’m writing in a familiar house and recognize the sounds around me – the neighbor upstairs, the car on the street. But they seem to stand at a distance, sung apart from the big connections I saw at first.

What surprises me: I find this melancholy or better yet mourning – refreshing. Suddenly, I find myself in the now, so often sung, the moment that stands on its own independent of a goal outside of it. The same thing yesterday, on my bike through the city: I recognized the streets, but looked through the images of my memory. As if I didn’t really live there, but was just passing through. Of course, that’s what we all are in this world: passing through.

I project plans onto the world and when the plans are carried out – successful or not – I do the same with my memories. But underneath all the “I” of my memories and plans lies a much larger world. A world that opens up when I step out of my head and the groove of my routine. From the confines of my thoughts jump the shapes and colors of things as they are at this moment.

I walk this path in my life not because it leads somewhere, but because it gives me meaning now – and it’s from that connection that I want to work.

Damien

Image: Marjoke Schulten, Constellation – the journey. In: Seasons of Life, a contemporary book of hours and pilgrims