The Great Journey of Life

I think that living is a journey, and that the movement is indispensable to survive.

No one in history ever survived sitting in the shadow of a tree, hoping that food would fall into his womb.

In recent years I have developed a metaphor to see how I perceive life: not as a climb, but as a sea trip.

Today I can decide to stay on an island; tomorrow I can want to go to a big city. There is no single destination and there is no right destination. Everyone can stay where they want, but to live must move and choose in a conscious way what movements to do.

At birth, we all get a box. Inside there are pieces: the legacy of knowledge of our family, the opportunities we have received, the context from which we leave. It’s not the same box for everyone. Someone has four pieces of wood and a broken curtain; others a box that would fill a shed. With the first, if you’re capable, build a raft. With the second, a yacht.

The problem is that not everyone receives a compass. Your parents can put the pieces in the box, but it’s not guaranteed that you can really build it. And if you build it, it’s not said everyone has it. It is not even said that we built it well: maybe there are pieces missing, maybe we find it late, maybe it takes time to learn how to read it. Yet, as soon as you build it, you learn to travel with times chosen by you.

But the biggest problem is another: no one receives an instruction manual. Some manage to build the boat or compass more or less well, by intuition or asking for help. Others struggle. Some don’t even try and spend their lives complaining like they never had the box, living on the boats of others. And there are those who, unable to build anything, face the sea swimming and drowning.

During the trip, we can all change the boat or the compass: disassemble, reassemble, lose pieces, find new ones. From the boat with which we left we can reach a completely different destination; or discover that the point of arrival we had imagined was not the right one.

Who soon manages to build well the boat advantaged part. Pick up faster pieces and find a direction first. It does not mean that the sea becomes easy: the sea remains difficult for everyone. But it changes the quality of the journey.

The journey alternates moments of calm at moments of storm. Some need the storm to go fast: they sail and exploit the wind and the waves. Others need the calm sea to go to the maximum: they sail by motor. They are different strategies to face life.

Someone dies on the trip. Someone improves his boat so much that whoever sees him today wouldn’t recognize him. But everyone travels, moves and gets busy, each in his own way.

The sea has no rules except those of physics, and life is a new world that only expects to be navigated, lived and told.

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