Life is a roadtrip. The destination is the end. When this is understood, there is no option but to appreciate and approach differently “the middle”, the highway, the asphalt ribbons binding the earth to sky. How peculiar this human condition: to be born into motion, to find ourselves already traveling, never having chosen the departure point yet somehow responsible for the manner of our journey. We hurtle forward with magnificent urgency toward a terminus we cannot see but know with certainty awaits.
Memento Mori
Remember that you will die, whisper the ancient voices. This remembrance is not intended to cast shadows across our windshield. For death is not the thief of meaning. Its unavoidable neon lit presence illuminates the landscape through which we pass. Its fickle flitters add intrigue to the middle pilgrimage. Each bright flash makes rest stops more sacred, more scenic, altars of momentary eternity. The traveler who mistakes of the odometer for the oracle, the GPS for gospel, races through valleys without lifting eyes to the mountains, counting only the distance remaining, blind to the distance lived. The mindful wanderer understands the way is life itself: via et veritas et vita. The cargo shifts as we navigate. Some treasures fall away, others rise to prominence. What seemed essential at departure may prove ballast mid-journey.
Tempus fugit
The awakened traveler stretches time without changing it. Minutes become canyons, hours; horizons. Duration makes way for dimension, revealing layers of meaning invisible to the hurried eye. They travel through significance, not space, measuring distance in moments, wonder, and connection. Celebration overtakes endurance, where celebrations goes, endurance follows.
Carpe Diem
Perhaps deeper wisdom lies in letting the moment claim us so completely that past and future merge into clarity, wholeness; the purity of presence. The mile marker reading “here”, we measure depth in addition to velocity as distance dissolves on the inevitable journey to elsewhere. The paradox revealing itself in accepting the inevitability of arrival. Each breath becomes both ending and beginning, each heartbeat a small death and resurrection. The middle is not the space between start and finish but the eternal present where all starting and finishing occurs. The infinity of departure.