The journey is the bit where the stories come from.
Stories don’t come from the destination. Stories come from the journey to get there. When I cycled from John-O-Groats to Lands End in 2011 there is only one story that I tell from the destination. And that is about the remarkable fact that they party waiting for us at the finish line had not bothered to bring the champagne, and so the imagined arrival at the end, being greeted by our families, drinking ice-cold champagne and celebrating our achievement was the biggest anticlimax ever! Now that is a story, but it is only a story because of the memorability of the anticlimax. And destinations are often just that – an anticlimax.
The rest of the stories from that trip (and there are many) come from the miles shared between four friends on the road from one end of the country to the other.
If all we do is focus on the end result then we risk missing the best and most important bits. It is the journey that teaches us about ourselves and others. The journey introduces us to new thoughts, ideas and places. We learn things on the journey that we didn’t know before. We make friends, experience emotions and discover things about ourselves and our world that we would not have but for the journey that we have taken.
Regardless of the end goal, never let the journey be just the means to get there. Never forget that it is the journey that matters. Whether you reach your destination, fall short or miss it and arrive somewhere else, you will still have the journey. And that’s where the gold and the growth is.
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