Tag: journey

From Whence We’ve Come

I took a deep breath and admired the view.

Behind me stood the columns of the Parthenon. Ahead of me, the white, sunlit rooftops of Athens stretched into the distance.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out my Canon PowerShot camera. As I prepared to take some photos, I heard my mother’s voice.

Worth the climb, huh?

Ah yes, the climb. The steep 500-foot ascent from the city center to this point. I’d been hypnotized by this vista and forgotten about it. Until now.

The flashback to this recent trek made me shudder. Thank goodness my family made that climb on one of the coldest days of the year. Those poor souls who visited Athens in the dead of summer had it rough.

As I considered all this, I reflexively lowered my right arm. The PowerShot was still firmly in my hand, but that hand was now parallel with the outside of my jeans.

I raised my arm once again to take some more photos. But now the view looked different.

The city looked grander, the sun brighter, and the hills in the distance more luscious.

It had been an arduous trek to get up here. And now, the destination appeared worthy of the journey.

I took a few steps and anchored my feet upon the crushed rubber surface.

The view ahead of me now was not that of Greek hills and valleys. Instead, it was the flat oval of a running track in the faded light of dawn.

I was about to embark on my first run workout in seven months. And I was equal parts nervous and hopeful.

I pressed a button on my watch, and I was off. Within seconds, I was flying down the front stretch with reckless abandon.

I felt alive. I felt free — if only for a moment.

By the time I hit the backstretch of the track, I was gassed. Three more laps at this pace were just not in the cards.

So, I dialed the pace back, lap by lap. That mile-long journey resembled a slow fade.

Moments later, I stepped off the track for a swig of water. As I grabbed my bottle, I was despondent.

Why was this so hard? Had I lost my way?

I thought back on my preparation that morning. Had I not stretched for long enough? Had I not fueled properly?

And then, out of nowhere, I thought back to that morning in Athens.

You see, I was out here standing on high, taking the view ahead of me at face value. All while ignoring the arduous journey to my perch.

I had willingly forgotten about the injury I’d suffered, the doctor’s visits I’d had, the surgery I’d endured. I had buried the memories of lying in an MRI machine, hobbling around in a walking boot, or struggling through endless Physical Therapy exercises.

The journey back seemed irrelevant. How I’d gotten my second chance meant less than what I did with it.

I had to make the most of my opportunity. And I simply hadn’t yet.

But maybe I was deluding myself.

The Parthenon of Athens is iconic. But it’s also a reminder of what once was.

Indeed, the columns basking in the Mediterranean sunlight represented the skeleton of a great temple. And in the days when that temple stood intact, a legend reverberated through the Greek hills.

The legend was that of Heracles — better known to us as Hercules.

After killing his family in a fit of madness, Hercules was assigned 12 tasks to satisfy his penance. These tasks were nearly impossible to achieve. Yet, Hercules risked life and limb to master them.

This process elevated Hercules. Not only did he erase the shame he had brought upon his name, but he also gained mythical status.

The arc of Hercules is a narrative lynchpin— one commonly referred to as a man in hole story. As the late novelist Kurt Vonnegut once pointed out, audiences admire that narrative. So, tens of thousands of tales now follow its pattern.

Even so, I feel this fascination is mostly aspirational.

We accept the protagonist’s ordeals only if they lead to a better outcome. We want to see that figure thrive on the backside of adversity. For it proves that our own lowest of lows can lead to the highest of highs.

Yet, something laudable gets lost in this process. Namely, the return to the status quo.

Getting back to where we started is a non-event. It just isn’t worth writing home about.

We need the culmination first.

As I stood beside the track after my workout, I realized just how far into this trap I’d fallen.

I was obsessed with what I was to become. And I was unwilling to just be.

Perhaps more achievements were in store for me. Perhaps they weren’t.

But just getting back to running was a notable feat. And it was high time I recognized it.

A trek to the heights of Athens would surely look different these days.

The columns of the Parthenon still stand. And that vista of sunlit rooftops persists.

But that Canon PowerShot that was in my right hand that winter morning? It’s long been retired.

Six months after I descended from the Acropolis, Apple founder Steve Jobs took the stage in California. He announced a revolutionary product called the iPhone.

That device — and others like it — changed the way we interact with each other, shop, read the news, and take photos.

It’s perhaps the greatest example of our society’s thirst for better.

It’s easy to get caught up in novelty. It’s all too natural to do so.

But what’s next isn’t all that matters.

What we have, what we’ve built, what we’ve regained — all of that is significant.

It’s important to consider from whence we’ve come, and to celebrate our accomplishments. It can provide needed perspective. And it can relieve some of the tension inherent in our drive for more.

I will try to consider the bigger picture moving forward. Will you?

The Danger of Premature Celebration

There’s an indelible image that’s lodged in my mind.

It comes from a Monday Night Football game between the Dallas Cowboys and the Philadelphia Eagles that took place several years ago.

In the second quarter of the game, the Eagles quarterback drops back and unleashes a majestic throw. The ball spirals sharply through the warm Texas night, landing in the arms of receiver DeSean Jackson as he’s running at full-stride 60 yards downfield near the goal line.

Jackson raises his arms in jubilation as he prepares for his touchdown celebration dance. He then points mockingly toward the Dallas fans and starts dancing in the end zone, just beyond the silver paint that reads COWBOYS.

It was a moment of sweet jubilation for Jackson — making a highlight-reel play on national television.

There was one problem. He didn’t have the ball.

When Jackson raised his arms, he was still two yards from the goal line. The ball popped backward out of his hand and bounded away behind him.

There was no touchdown. Just a fumble.

With all that dancing and gesturing, DeSean Jackson was only making a mockery of himself — on national television.

I’m captivated by this image. For it is the ultimate cautionary tale for our most obnoxious character flaw.

Premature celebration.

 

Our culture is built upon celebration.

As a capitalist society, we continually indoctrinate ourselves in the ethos of Taking what’s ours.

This ethos has had several iterations over the years.

First, pioneers and frontiersmen pushed their way west from the Atlantic to the Pacific, clearing swaths of forests and decimating native tribes to lay claim to the land.

Journalists of that era named the process Manifest Destiny — a term that whitewashed the true ugliness of what was going on. Out west, frontier life was punctuated by brutal acts of celebration.

Murderous bandits roamed the prairie, claiming ever bigger scores of gold and glory. Native tribesmen collected scalps off of their captives. And public hangings drew crowds of hundreds, even in one-horse towns.

In each case, someone was taking what was theirs, but at another’s expense. And they weren’t shy in letting the world know about it.

As the lawlessness of the west died down, a new revolution started back east. Stock and bond trading went from a side industry to the mainstream, turning Wall Street from a city street to a cultural icon.

Those who got rich in the early years of this movement weren’t afraid to flaunt their wealth. They dressed to the nines and threw extravagant parties. The era became known as The Roaring Twenties, and the roar was resonant — until the 1929 stock market crash brought an abrupt end to the party.

As America emerged from the Great Depression and the ensuing World War, the art of celebration went national for the first time. Radio and television programs made it from coast to coast, and Hollywood had more cultural influence than ever before. As new generation became infatuated with entertainment, our culture of celebration truly took root.

Now, what was once a campfire has erupted into a full-on inferno. Today, we focus less on what we accomplish and more on how we celebrate those accomplishments.

For that is how we’ll be judged. That is how we’ll be remembered.

And that, I assure you, that is what was running through the mind of DeSean Jackson when he foolishly dropped the ball two yards from glory.

Swim through the wall.

These four words sound like terrible advice — if you take them at face value.

After all, the water has plenty of give. It parts itself as we cut through it, as if beckoned by Moses’ staff.

The wall has no give. It stands as firm as the Himalayas, demanding deference.

But from a different perspective, what seems like folly is pure gold.

Yes, metaphorically, Swim through the wall means Don’t let up.

Or, more specifically: Achieve now. Celebrate later.

It’s simple advice. But that simplicity doesn’t make it any less effective.

DeSean Jackson could have used that advice on that warm Texas night all those years ago. But truth be told, we all could use that advice.

For the act of claiming victory is more foolish now than ever.

There is always more work to be done. In an era when information and collaboration travel digitally, the next challenge beckons around the corner.

Changing tastes make what’s acceptable today unacceptable tomorrow. Relentless innovation accelerates the demise of those who refuse to adapt. And the existential threat of violent extremism persists, no matter how relentlessly we beat it back.

Yet, it seems we can’t help ourselves. We can’t stop raising our arms in triumph and beating our chests, even as the goalposts for these issues drift ever further away.

Don’t believe me? Consider this.

There was a time when entertainers like R. Kelly, Bill Cosby, Michael Jackson and Kevin Spacey were the toast of the town. We talked about their brilliance and their talent — and turned the other way as they abused the power of their celebrity.

There was a time when quarterly earnings from Sears and Kodak drew news coverage. We made the Sears catalog a staple of our holiday shopping lists and planned around Kodak Moments — dismissing the notion that such references would ever be obsolete.

And there was a time we spoke of the end of segregation, the end of toxic radicalism, and the end of hate — conveniently forgetting that such troublesome ideas are like a Hydra, and don’t just die with the body they’re housed in.

Over and over we’ve declared victory too early. And in each case, the collateral damage was massive.

We should know better than this. We should recognize that life can rarely be placed into neat little boxes, each topped with a bow.

No, life is a messy, unpredictable journey. A constant parade of experiences and challenges to claw our way through. An abundant set of opportunities for us to pick ourselves up and reach for something greater.

We’re better off embracing that climb, and the inevitable change that comes with it. We’re better off preparing for what’s ahead than celebrating what’s imminent.

So, let’s not make a mockery of ourselves. Let’s not get egg on our face.

Timing is everything. Best to get it right.

On To China

When I was 10 years old, my parents did something crazy.

They took our family on a month-long trip to China.

Now, on the face of it, this might not sound so outlandish. People go on exotic vacations all the time. And China is an emergent tourist destination, filled with the capitalist façade of the western world — particularly in the years since it hosted the 2008 Olympics.

But this was in 1998. And it was the first trip outside the United States for both me and my sister, who was 7 at the time.

So, yeah. It was pretty crazy.

The unusual decision my parents made becomes more sensible with context.

When I was six months old, my parents hosted a young woman from the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia, who had emigrated to the U.S. with a Green Card. She became an integral part of our family, quickly gaining the honorary title of “Chinese sister.” She served as my babysitter initially, and later attended college in Vermont.

After graduation, she landed a position with JP Morgan in Hong Kong. Yet, she would make the long trek back to New York at least once a year to visit us.

After a few years, she approached my parents with a novel proposal. What it we all rendezvoused in China?

Hong Kong had been transferred from British to Chinese rule by then, enabling easier travel between the mainland and the territory. So, our Chinese sister could travel with us on much of our journey. She also offered to cover the round-trip plane tickets for my sister and myself — which was no small feat.

The plan was set. It was on to China.

In the weeks before our journey to the Far East, I felt anxious. I had only ventured outside of the Northeast twice, and one of those trips happened when I was too young to remember it. I had only been on an airplane a handful of times, and never for more than 6 hours. And I knew nothing of life outside of the U.S., aside from what I’d seen in a few movies.

My father tried to reassure me, but he was also brutally honest about what to expect. He said that instead of toilets, some Chinese restrooms just had holes in the ground to squat over. (This turned out to be true, but not on a wide scale.) He said that not everyone in China would understand English. (This was a massive understatement.) And he said many restaurants would not have forks. (This also turned out to be true, so we brought a reusable plastic silverware kit with us.)

All of this only exacerbated my anxiety, so I tried not to think about the trip until I was en route. That was probably for the best, because I had no idea what I was in for.

The journey started with a cross-country flight to San Francisco. After a day venturing around the City by the Bay, we got on a 2 AM flight to South Korea.

The Transpacific flight felt like an eternity. I stayed awake the entire time, watching the GPS tracker on the overhead TV screens and looking down at the clouds and the ocean below. By the time we landed in Seoul, I was exhausted. Yet, the morning sun was blinding, so I forced myself to stay awake after our subsequent flight to Beijing took off.

After a couple more hours of staring out an airplane window at the sea and sky, I heard an announcement from the captain asking us to prepare for landing. I was confused, because all I saw around us was a giant cloud. Surely, we couldn’t be about to land. Could we?

We descended through the cloud, and I heard the landing gear deploy. At the last second, the clouds cleared and I saw the runway come into view. We touched down safely and the plane taxied over to a dilapidated airport terminal.

Welcome to China.

I would soon learn that the cloud the airplane had descended through was no cloud at all. It was actually haze from China’s rampant pollution.

That haze never really subsided. During our week in Beijing, there was sunshine in the forecast on all but one day (when it rained). But I never saw blue skies. It just looked dreary and overcast.

I had never seen such thick pollution before. And I’ve yet to see it since.

But the haze was only the tip of the iceberg. After we got to the hotel from the airport, my sister and I took a nap. Suddenly, our mother woke us up, insisting that we go for an afternoon walk to adjust to the time change. It was on this walk that I noticed how different things looked.

There were no glass skyscrapers in our midst. The city buildings looked old and uniform. So did the vehicles roaming the massive boulevards, which were six lanes in each direction.

Crossing the street was an adventure, as drivers seemed to ignore traffic laws at will. We had to join a throng of people to cross some streets, and use underground pedestrian walkways to cross others.

I got the keen sense that we had not only traveled to a new land, but had also traveled back in time. There was a very 1950s feel about 1990s Beijing.

The subsequent days were full of misadventures. We took a Chinese tour bus for a day trip — even though no one on the bus spoke English, and none of us spoke Mandarin. I passed out from dehydration while climbing the Great Wall in the nearly 100 degree heat. And my father argued with a cab driver who didn’t start the meter on his taxi. It turns out the restaurant we were heading to was around the corner, and the taxi driver didn’t want to charge us what amounted to a 5 cent fare.

But ultimately, the strangest thing for me was posing for pictures with strangers. Many people in Beijing had not ever seen an American kid before. One by one, they asked my sister and I to pose for pictures with their children — some in broken English, others through the form of vehement gesturing that transcends language barriers. After a day of this, I felt like Mickey Mouse.

Beijing was an eye-opening experience for me. But there were plenty more surprises to come.

I have no idea what the typical tourist trail was in China in 1998, but I imagine it would include visits to Beijing, Shanghai and the Great Wall.

Our itinerary was different, for two main reasons.

First, we were obliged to travel to Inner Mongolia to meet our Chinese sister’s family.

Second, we had all grown fond of the Sesame Street movie Big Bird In China, in which the iconic bird with the obnoxious voice travels off the beaten path to explore China’s hidden beauty.

So, with these objectives in mind, we broke from the standard tourist script. Instead of boarding a flight to Shanghai, we took an overnight train to Inner Mongolia’s capital, Hohhot.

Hohhot was a prairie outpost compared to Beijing. Yet, in a nation of more than a billion people, even the smaller cities loomed large. Broad boulevards stretched for miles on end, the bike lanes as wide as the main lanes. And apartment buildings stretched as far as the eye could see.

Our Chinese sister’s parents lived in a modest apartment 15 minutes from the center of town. The apartment’s bathroom didn’t have a dedicated shower in the bathroom — just a shower head near the ceiling and a drain in the floor. So, we had to plan out when we were washing up, and when we were taking care of other business.

Sometimes, neither option was available. There were rolling power and water outages; electricity and water pressure were rarely functioning at the same time.

Some of these outages might have come from Hohhot’s daily afternoon thunderstorms, but I believe poor infrastructure played a role as well. After all, the preferred way to remove garbage in Hohhot was to put it in a neighbor’s backyard. That neighbor would then move it to another neighbor’s yard, and so on.

Behind the apartment, contractors worked day and night to build a massive new complex. In the week we were in Hohhot, these workers completed an entire floor. This amount of progress would be seemingly unthinkable back in the U.S., where construction projects seemed to languish for months in the 1990s.

Aside from these tidbits, my most vivid memory from our time in Inner Mongolia was our trip to the grasslands. We took a two-hour car ride into the most remote scenery I’ve ever encountered. Rolling, grassy pastures stretched out to the horizon in every direction, and there was nary a tree in sight. Puffy clouds dropped small shadows on parts of the landscape. Shadows that danced and drifted as the clouds moved across the sky.

We set up in a Yurt — a fortified Mongolian tent with an open roof — and then went on a long horseback ride across the grasslands. Unfortunately, I got heatstroke on the ride, and had to return to the Yurt to recuperate. I slept for 12 hours, missing the spectacle that evening when my father got drunk on a potent barley liquor.

I had never seen my father drunk before, so I was quite confused when I woke up the next morning and noticed he was not acting like himself. My mother alternated between taking care of him and tending to me. I was still feeling the effects of dehydration, so the car ride back to Hohhot was harrowing. But once we got back to the city, we found our form in short order.

Just in time, too. We had a train to catch.

Our next stop on our China tour was Datong. Home to iconic attractions, such as a cave filled with chiseled Buddha statues and a monastery suspended from a cliff, Datong was nonetheless the most backwater city we visited. The streets were barren of the shopping malls I’d seen in Beijing and Hohhot. There weren’t many restaurants. And our hotel was horrid.

Datong was very much a coal town. Dump trucks would barrel by me on the street, covering me in soot. It also seemed quite poor. Homeless people wearing soiled rags begged for change outside the train station, and some of the homeless were women with young children. I had never seen this level of poverty before. It was jarring.

After a few days in Datong, we took an overnight train to Xian. Home to the Terra Cotta warriors — a massive phalanx of porcelain soldiers an ancient emperor commissioned to protect him in the afterlife — Xian was the place where I discovered the phenomenon that is KFC in China. We paid the Colonel a visit so my sister and I could get a taste of home. But we quickly learned that finding a seat in the restaurant would be a difficult proposition. It was strange to see a fast-food joint so packed, but it was also refreshing to see how there was some food the Chinese and I both enjoyed.

Upon leaving Xian, we flew to Guilin in the southern part of the country. Guilin was perched along the winding Li River, surrounded by rice paddies in the shadow of scenic mountains with rounded tops. Big Bird had once visited this area. Now, we were seeing it with our own eyes.

As we cruised in a boat down the Li River to the village of Yangshao, I couldn’t help but think that the scenery was even more beautiful in person than it was on a VHS tape. For the first time in three weeks of travels, I felt comfortable and relaxed in the Far East.

Those happy vibes went away by dinnertime, however. As we sat at a sidewalk restaurant in Yangshao, I noticed that dog and snake were on the menu. I thought it might have been a bad translation to English at first. But then I noticed a caricature of a snake next to the snake dish, and a picture of Snoopy next to the dog item. This was no accident.

I had heard before that people in other countries eat dogs, but seeing it listed on the menu still rattled me. Frankly, it still does today.

Yet, aside from that issue, Guilin and Yangshao were among the more memorable segments of the trip for me. It was the point in the journey where I finally found some inner peace.

The final stop in our journey was Hong Kong. It was refreshing to hear English again, and to see a modern skyline. The weather was hot and steamy, but the city was picturesque, with skyscrapers and a mountain peak rising up from the harbor.

Since the elevation on Hong Kong Island changed so drastically, many people took a series of outdoor escalators from the high-rise apartments up the mountain to the Central Business District. We were staying in our Chinese sister’s apartment on the mountainside, so we rode the escalators right along with the natives when we went sightseeing.

Our time in Hong Kong was jam-packed with activities. We took a speedboat to the then-Portuguese colony of Macau for a day, had dinner on a floating restaurant on a boat anchored offshore, and made an ill-fated trip to an amusement park on a 102 degree day, among other things. All in all, it was the perfect way to end the trip.

As we took the long train ride back to the Hong Kong airport, I was filled with dread. I had come to enjoy my time in China, and was not looking forward to 18 more hours on a plane. Truthfully, I was no longer sure what was real and what was not anymore. Did my life before our trip to China exist? Or was it a figment of my imagination?

After a short flight to Seoul and a much longer flight to New York, I was back in America. The humid summer night air felt hauntingly familiar, everything looked the same as it did before we left. The skyline, the cars, our house, they were all the same as it had been a month before. If not for the pile of New York Times sports sections I’d asked my grandparents to collect for me while I was gone, there would be no sign I’d even left.

I was elated, overwhelmed and confused. I broke down and cried.

I have traveled abroad plenty in the years since our China trip, although I haven’t had my passport stamped for more than a decade now.

I’ve been to Europe and the Middle East. I’ve been to three countries in South America. And I’ve crossed the border to Canada and Mexico.

Yet, I have not returned to the Far East since that seminal journey in 1998.

I know China is far a different place now than it was then. South Korea and Japan, as well. Heading to Asia now would be an entirely different journey than it was before.

Maybe that’s why I have little desire to go.

You see, the trip to China impacted me in ways I can’t fully explain.

I recognized that the moment I came back home and started sobbing. The world hadn’t changed, but my understanding of it certainly had.

Despite all my anxiety about traveling, despite my refusal to eat many of the strange meals , despite my bouts with heatstroke and dehydration, the experience had been invaluable.

Seeing a starkly different place — one filled with poverty, polluted with coal dust and saddled with poor infrastructure — made me recognize just how fortunate I was to enjoy the trappings of American life. Even if those trappings were a blue sky overhead and an electric grid that worked 24-7.

The China of today isn’t saddled with many of the issues it once was. So my experience was as much one of time as it was of place.

I am keenly aware of this fact. And I am appreciative of the time I spent on the other side of the Pacific.

I wouldn’t have done what my parents did. If I were a parent in the 1990s, I wouldn’t have taken my kids to China for their maiden international voyage.

But looking back, I sure am glad they did.

Passing The Test

What do you remember from your time in school?

Classes and homework, most likely. But also tests.

Tests are a fundamental part of the education experience. They’re the prove it moments. The opportunities to show what we’ve learned by answering a set of specific questions.

This is especially the case later in the education experience. Test scores define grades, provide us admission to the next level of learning and even certify us to practice certain professions.

Tests require preparation. They demand focus. And they can cause students great amounts of stress and anxiety.

Why is that? Because of the high stakes, for sure. But also because of the lack of control.

In most testing environments, we don’t know what’s coming. We might have some ideas as to the topics and general focus. But we don’t know the exact questions we’ll be working with until we’re in the moment.

This makes the build-up process somewhat of a toss-up. Studying involves internalizing information, practicing sample questions, and taking educated guesses as to the actual questions we’ll see in prime time.

It also changes our expectations of the learning experience. We focus our attention solely on the topics that might be on the test. We synthesize most of the information we learn in the waning hours before the test. And we take our performance from the test as a full indication of our potential.

We might succeed in this endeavor. But we’re ultimately setting ourselves up to fail.

You see, the test-intensive education structure is focused on the wrong things. It looks solely at the outcome, at the destination. And it gives that outcome, that result, an inordinate amount of weight when it comes to opening doors to our future.

This setup sends the wrong messages to students.

For one thing, it systemizes gratification. We’re raised to believe If we do one thing, we’ll get something else. Yet, outside the classroom, doing one thing only gives you the opportunity to get something else.

The world is notoriously random and irrational. Building an expectation of fairness and gratification in impressionable young students is downright reckless.

But perhaps more importantly, this focus on outcomes undercuts the very efficacy of education.

You see, learning is more about the journey than the destination. Sure, it can provide great benefits — such as the ability to make more informed decisions and live a more prosperous life. But ultimately, learning is a process. One that is built up gradually over time.

A heavy-handed focus on a few specific data points unravels the entire ball of yarn.

Now, instead of focusing on steady, incremental growth, we emphasize a feast-or-famine approach. We encourage students to pack their brains with information right before a test, data dump it during the exam, and then quickly forget what they’ve just memorized.

The sheer ridiculousness of this cycle is clear. In fact, it’s valid to ask if students really learn anything at all through this process.

The answer, too often, is no.

And that’s a problem.

Because the world needs us to keep learning. It needs us to continually embrace the pattern of growth.

Not just for us to leave our mark on society. But for us to simply survive the day-to-day.

For every day is a series of tests. From the moment we wake up to the moment we hit the pillow, we face a series of new situations and challenges.

These tests don’t follow an academic course structure. We can’t do much to anticipate them ahead of time. We walk into them blind.

It’s on us to build off what we’ve previously learned to handle these situations well in the heat of the moment.

Sometimes we’ll pass with flying colors. Other times, we won’t.

But regardless the result, we can learn from the experience. And use the information we’ve gleaned to prepare us for the next challenge we face.

This is incrementalism at its finest. It’s a full-bore commitment to the journey over the destination. And it’s critical to our daily existence, no matter our walk of life.

We must get on board with growth mindset. Our future depends on it.

So, stop thinking in terms of big moments and gratification. Of tests and grades.

Look at the big picture. Embrace the process.

The journey will be more rewarding.

Journey or Destination?

Are we there yet?

It’s one of the more cliché images out there: The kid in the back seat of the car asking that question over and over.

This image serves as a maddening reminder — both of the impatience of children and the petulance of adults. For while we might hope our kids will embrace the journey, our actions belie that outcome.

Our society is built off of destinations. We both celebrate and incentivize weddings, graduations and job promotions. We shoot endlessly for notoriety and recognition. We fight as ferociously as lions to achieve, all so we can revel in the spoils of victory.

We pay little attention to the journey we take to get to these destinations; if anything, we consider it a nuisance that delays achievement of our goals.

So why should we expect our young, impressionable children to act any different on a long car ride? Why should we expect anything less than a culture of instant gratification as those children grow up and become Millennials and Gen Z-ers?

We should know better. All we have to do is look in the mirror.

***

Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way. If we can learn to embrace the journey we take to our destination, we’ll have a better example to set. And we’ll get more mileage out of the life we live.

But this requires us to do something terrifying: Stop and reflect.

Instead of only considering the next milestone, we should take a moment to consider where we are at a certain point in time. Then we need consider how we got to that point and how we hope to proceed.

This process will likely make us feel vulnerable; after all, our society has trained us specifically not to feel comfortable with this. But once we scale that mountain of apprehension, we’ll unlock something priceless.

You see, each journey we take tells its own story — one the connects origin and destination. These journeys are rarely linear; there are plenty twists and turns along the way.

And those wrinkles in our path mean everything. The hours of hard work we put in, the bouts of adversity we so bravely face — they help make us stronger, smarter and more determined. They allow us to experience life at its fullest and most real as we shoot for our hopes and dreams. And they make those achievements so much sweeter.

***

We must take the time to connect the dots. To understand that where we’re coming from and where we are matters as much as where we hope to go. To realize that our story is our own, and our journey is its conduit.

Yes, our journey is the key to living a more enlightened life — one that balances a sense of purpose with full awareness of the process that goes into it.

So, the next time you find yourself looking only at your next destination, stop and embrace your path toward it.

The journey matters. Enjoy the ride.