Everyone has heard some variation of “it’s the journey, not the destination, that matters” a hundred times. Blah blah, useless bullshit platitudes are a dime a dozen.

So why am I writing about this? I don’t know, I just have to.

I feel like we all kinda know this, right? History, both our collective history and our personal history, is littered with examples of wanting something, striving for it, and then not really being satisfied when we achieve it. It doesn’t matter if it’s money, a certain job, a particular house, a competition, a spouse, kids, whatever. We fool ourselves into thinking “if I just get to ___ I’ll be happy” – but then, are we? Maybe coincidentally, but not because of the thing we were striving for.

In fact, maybe we’re happy because of the striving. And, maybe that “ok, on to the next thing” response or feeling that so many of us have once we achieve the thing is some kind of evolutionary insurance policy to keep us striving. Huh, what if it’s that? What if it’s just a trick hardwired into our brains to make sure we keep trying for new things?

I have no idea if that’s the case; nothing to back that up – I really am just wondering this out loud as I’m writing.

So, is success – or, perhaps, true happiness? – figuring out how to bypass that? Is it understanding that it’s the in between bits, the movement, the process, that is where the really good stuff is?

I don’t know, maybe. Sometimes I’m pretty convinced it is. There are days when I can feel completely in awe of the beauty of even the smallest things. I can walk outside, harvest food from my garden, and revel in the beauty of a single bee pollinating my zucchini plants. There’s a whole fractally amazing universe of joy and wonder and depth right there outside my back door.

And then there are days when I’m bored, or unsettled, or searching for dopamine and looking in all the wrong places and scrolling and stress eating and just passing the time until some next thing that I think might make me happy and missing basically everything good and worthy right in front of me.

“Process”. What is that? At a basic level it’s just the steps you take or go through, right? It’s the steps you take to plant a garden, or wash the dishes, or do your work of whatever kind. I suspect if we go through a process with intention, care, and reverence, then that’s where we can be changed and affected. That the point is that in the doing, we can find life and be moved.

Maybe that’s those small things like gardening or doing the dishes. That’s the sacred and mundane.

But I have a hunch that if we take that approach with us wherever we go – as much as we remember, or are able to – then we might find we’re affected and stretched and pushed and pulled into new shapes, or perhaps into the shapes our selves really want to be formed into, but that we haven’t let ourselves be.

So then it’s being open and attentive to the process in more ways. That’s what I’m doing here, right? I’m writing this to process my thoughts. And it’s not the end result that really matters, that might really deeply affect me (or anyone else). It’s the process of writing it, of reaching down into my self and grasping whatever thoughts I can and making a messy attempt to put words to those thoughts and shape them into something that might for just a moment make some sense to me, and perhaps to you, too.

My wife, Amanda, told me some months ago that she thought I needed to write an essay with this title, and for that I am grateful.