Wee Sprout 13

"To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive."

- Robert Louis Stevenson

It is accurate to say that life chews you up and spits you out, with absolutely no reward guaranteed. There is the promise of something better, but not in this life. We need to stop thinking like children, we need to grow up and do what we need to do. It is a cliche, but life is a journey, and the important thing is the traveling upon the journey, not about arriving at the destination. We might only be able to guess at the destination, or pray "by the Grace of God," but it is the journey, not the destination that it is important to focus our energies upon.

If we notice the landscape passing outside, we can learn something. If we stop and get out and look around, talk to someone, explore the streets, new neurons will form in our brains, we will have new experiences to draw upon. And many of these new experiences will not even be pleasant while we are experiencing them. In a "for the moment" kind of way, they might seem completely worthless and painful.

Yet, when we have the chance to look back on the journey passed, the life lived, and compare it to the journey as a whole, we can begin to see patterns in the seeming chaos, we can begin to understand why this bad thing happened, why this uncomfortable moment had to be, and the hard things can be seen as waymarks on this journey. We can see life as shaping us, not chewing us up, life is forming us, not destroying us. And if we have faith, we can comprehend that there is a God, behind the scenes, in control of life itself. This is comfort.

So there is a real hope to keep getting up each time we are knocked down. It is not just because we are stubbornly thick-headed (although sometimes this might be all we have), but because there is a bigger reason, we know we are upon a journey, that there is a shape to the journey, and that there is a real reason behind the life we are living, and there is always hope that there will be more good experiences, even while realizing that there will always be the negative side of the journey. Keep getting up. Go on. Don't ever give up.

- Oz Moses