The Great Journey of Life

I think living is a journey, and that movement is indispensable for survival.

No one in history has ever survived by sitting in the shade of a tree, hoping that food would fall into their lap.

Over the last few years I developed a metaphor to visualize how I perceive life: not as a climb, but as a journey at sea.

Today I may decide to stay on an island; tomorrow I may want to go to a great city. There is no single destination and there is no universally right destination. Everyone can stay where they want, but to live they must move and consciously choose what movements to make.

At birth, we all receive a box. Inside there are pieces: the inheritance of knowledge from our family, the opportunities we received, the context from which we start. It is not the same box for everyone. Some people have four pieces of wood and a broken tent; others have a box that could fill a warehouse. With the first, if you are capable, you build a raft. With the second, a yacht.

The problem is that not everyone receives a compass. Your parents may put the pieces in the box, but it is not guaranteed that you will really manage to build it. And if you build it, it is not certain that everyone has one. Nor is it certain that we built it well: maybe pieces are missing, maybe we find it late, maybe it takes time to learn how to read it. Yet the earlier you build it, the earlier you learn to travel on your own timing.

But the biggest problem is another one: no one receives an instruction manual. Some manage to build the boat or the compass more or less well, by intuition or by asking for help. Others struggle. Some do not even try and spend their lives complaining as if they had never received the box, living on other people’s boats. And there are those who, unable to build anything, face the sea by swimming and drown.

During the journey, all of us can change the boat or the compass: take it apart, rebuild it, lose pieces, find new ones. From the boat we started with, we can reach a completely different destination; or discover that the arrival point we had imagined was not the right one.

Whoever manages early on to build a good boat starts with an advantage. They gather better pieces more quickly and find a direction sooner. This does not mean the sea becomes easy: the sea remains difficult for everyone. But the quality of the journey changes.

The journey alternates moments of calm and moments of storm. Some people need the storm to move fast: they sail and use wind and waves. Others need a calm sea to perform at their maximum: they travel by motor. They are different strategies for facing life.

Some die during the journey. Some improve their boat so much that whoever saw them today would not recognize them. But everyone travels, moves, and tries, each in their own way.

The sea has no rules other than those of physics, and life is a new world waiting only to be navigated, lived, and narrated.

Happiness, as I see it, is both the journey and the destination: two parts of the same unit, incomplete when separated.