Complete Self Protection By Al Peasland

IT'S ALL ABOUT THE JOURNEY

A few years ago I had to go on a particularly long journey. It was a road trip that started from my home in Northampton, included a quick stop at my place of work in Milton Keynes, before embarking on a slightly longer stint that would take me from the home of the cardboard sheep and cows, across the channel, through France, in and out of Germany; to the breath freezing Capital of Switzerland; Zurich.

The reason for the trip was merely to act as a co-driver for a friend, the destination being their primary goal.

What I noticed along the way was how being focused on the final goal, frequently lets you miss the sights along the way.

There’s a very old saying that goes something like..

"We often trip over £5 to pick up £1"

I think it was Winston Churchill who implied the same thing when he said...

“We often stumble over the truth and get up as though nothing had happened”

We become so focused on where we want to be, and how quickly we want to get there, that we forget to enjoy ourselves on the way.

So, the first step was to plan my route, and what struck me immediately; something I hadn’t taken much notice of before, was the way all navigation systems and route planning websites seem to default to the ‘Quickest’ route.

They all have options for you to modify your journey including, ‘Shortest’, ‘Quickest’, ‘Avoiding motorways’, ‘Avoiding A roads’; etc, but it is the ‘quickest’ route that is the default and often the one we use when planning the route.

Why?

Obviously because we want to get to where we’re going as fast as possible.

We are so focused on our destination that we just want to get there. What’s on our route is the least of our concerns.

So we take the wide roads, the flat roads, the smooth roads, the roads where the majority of other travellers will be because we know those to be the fastest.

The trouble is, the faster we travel the less we are able to look around and observe and experience the country that we are travelling through; missing all the sights and scenes that it has to offer along the way.

I was more excited about getting to Dover, pulling the car onto the Channel Tunnel (which, in my 35 years I had still not experienced) and making a little nest for myself in the car with flasks of coffee, sandwiches and cake. Every man’s staple diet when attempting a gruelling 16 – 20 hour road trip!

The way we travel down the motorway to work, often resembles the way we travel down the motorway of life. I want to travel in style. I want to choose the twisty windy roads, the ones that have the beautiful views. The ones that aren’t flattened and dumb’d down by mans need to “get there quicker”.

And if you must surround yourself with traffic, make sure it’s prestige, high-end traffic. People driving in their own dream cars.

Surround yourself with like minded people who are following their own dreams.
I want to be in a procession of luxury cars, not a traffic jam of miserable, horn blowing rust buckets with people who would rather sit on the grid locked motorway and procrastinate about how long it’s going to take them to get to their destination whilst ignoring the beautiful scenery that surrounds them. The irony being that their destination is one which they probably aren’t looking forward to either.

Enjoy the journey. If you find you’re not enjoying it, ask yourself why. And when I say – not enjoying it – I don’t mean that if it’s a tough road, to turn around and find the comfortable flat of a motorway. The twisty, dirt tracks that head high into the mountains are always the toughest to climb, but it’s from those that you get the best views.

Everything comes at a price.

So, back to my roadtrip. We avoided as many motorways and autobahns as possible on our way to our destination. Sure, it added to our journey time, and we arrived in Zurich later, with a few more cakes consumed than planned. However, we arrived better people for it and what an amazing trip it was! We saw the beautiful sleepy villages cloaked in a fresh white blanket of snow; shadowed by the most amazing backdrop of the Swiss Alps. We saw the sun setting across Lake Geneva with the reflections of a thousand lights from the apartments and buildings dotted along the hills on the opposite side.

It was truly beautiful and we had more stories to tell, more sights logged into our memories and more knowledge of what lay on our doorstep,. We just had to take the time to seek it out.

So what’s the rush?

You’ll get there in the end and it’s these aspects of the journey that will make us grow.

Often, what we experience along the way, changes our original plans. They say, as we climb higher up the tree, our vantage point changes and so does our truth. What we believed to be the truth yesterday may be changed by what we can now see today from our higher vantage point.
This too applies to our journey and our vision and reasoning behind our destination.
It doesn’t matter if we change our minds on the way. If something we see on our journey changes our own truth and vision of where we ultimately want to go then that is the reason, and the purpose, of the journey in the first place.

There is far more to be learned and gained on the way than there is from the destination when we get there.

Imagine if the end result is the cake, then the journey is how you collect the ingredients and also how you learn the recipe and the cooking instructions. Without these lessons along the way you’re cake wouldn’t be worth striving for anyway.
I added that little analogy for one or two of my readers in particular – you know who you are!

Have you ever noticed when on holiday that the best beaches and the best views are usually those that are at the end of the least trodden paths?

This is nature’s demonstration that the best things are left for those who dare, for those who aren’t in a rush, for those who are brave enough to take the tougher, more arduous routes.

We all have friends who have travelled the world. Who have taken the customary year out to travel and backpack around the world.

I read that a young man on a motorbike managed to circumnavigate the globe in 20 days and that NASA are designing a craft that can travel completely around the world in as little as 2 hours.
If you travelled the world that fast, how much of it do you think you would have seen?
Now speak to someone who has spent a year, 5 years, or 10 years travelling around the world. It’s not difficult to predict who would have the best stories, who would have seen the most amazing, awe inspiring sights.

Ok, so some of you F1 engineers out there may be more interested in the mechanics of the NASA spacecraft, but you get my point.

We are so pre-occupied with getting to where we want to be that we forget the beauty is in the journey itself and not the destination.

My analogy of travelling the world is even more interesting as we always end up where we started. So unless you’re actually trying to set a world record what is the point in rushing? We only end up back at the beginning more quickly.

Life is the same. It’s one big journey and the beauty and the growth is in the discovery of the wonderful things that lay at the end of the rocky roads, the tops of the tallest hills, the bottom of the deepest ravines, the sands of the hidden beaches.

When I travel I want the journey to be the wondrous part, not the destination.
And when you get there you’ll have the best stories to tell, and you’ll be the one that will have grown the most in the process.

I’ll leave you with a great audio clip that echoes these thoughts.

Alan Watts - Life is a Musical and We were meant to Dance

In it Alan Watts talks about life as an opera or a musical.
Most musicals always end in a big crescendo; a powerful finale that everyone looks forward to.
However, if we were only really interested in this finale then we’d only turn up to listen to the last 5 minutes of the musical. In actual fact, it’s the journey through the previous hours of the musical that make the ending all the more special.
As Alan Watts says, our life should be like this. We shouldn’t be rushing to get to the finale, we should treat our lives like a musical and we were meant to dance

Thank you for reading.

I’m off on my own journey now, so I bid you Bon Voyage

Stay Safe & Have Fun

Al x

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