“Are we there yet?”

As a kid my family would often drive for days across Europe to get to a particular campsite for our vacation. It is not a pleasant memory, one of being annoyed by my sister (in my memory I was always the aggrieved party), and of my exasperated parents wondering why their children wouldn’t stop fighting over who was encroaching on whose half of the backseat.

Much of our lives are lived the same way. We are constantly trying to get somewhere before we can relax and be happy. We want to get the promotion, we need to be richer, get a house, then get the house perfect, get a relationship, then try to get the relationship to be perfect. We will finally get around to doing all the things we want to do, but only once everything that we ‘have’ to do gets done first.

While there is some value to the concept of delayed gratification, at its extreme it becomes obvious what the flaw is in this approach. Our ultimate destination is death. If we don’t enjoy the journey … well, we’re missing the whole thing. The journey is the thing we need to enjoy. We need to be able, at least occasionally, to pause, to enjoy whatever is happening now.

On the one hand meditation is a practice that helps with this. We pause. We sit. We breathe. We try to let go of all the internal and external pressures we have. We allow ourselves to observe the present, whatever is there.

But the idea of trying to appreciate the journey also applies to meditation itself. I often make the mistake of starting my meditation by hoping to get something out of it. I am looking at the destination of peace, tranquility, calm, maybe even a glimpse of some transcendent truth or something. But it doesn’t work very well that way. Meditation is the journey. It is simply about pausing and being with whatever is there, right then. Sometimes there is peace, calm, tranquility and even occasionally something amazing, but I can’t really hope to get any of that unless I let go of hoping to get any of that. The practice is the journey, the journey is the practice.

Next time you sit to meditate see if you can check your expectations at the door. It’s common, maybe even it is human nature, to be wanting to “be there yet”, but it’s going to work better if you can pause, look out of the window at what’s there now instead of where you think you want to be.