Our Journey...

Blaise Pascal once said that "the distinguishing charactoristic of humankind is distraction. We don't like what we see when we slow down long enough to look at our lives, so we keep ourselves distracted- we fill our lives with all sorts of trivial stuff and nonsense. That way we never have to confront our emptiness or longing; we simply don't have time for it." It's rather ironic- we're too busy with life to ponder life...
There is so much truth to Pascal's words; it seems that we take on more and more, trying to fill up every waking minute with noise, hurry, and crowds; these are the charactoristics of superficialness. If we truly want to learn to control our lives, rather than to be swept along with the "muchness" and mayhem of life, we must learn to recreate silence, stillness, in our lives. We must learn to center-down, to detach from life in order to regain control of our selves, to learn who we really are, what we really want, what makes us tick. We must learn introspection, meditation. Unfortunately, most of us are afraid to face who we really are, how we really are. Too often we find we don't like who we discover we are, and if we don't like ourselves, deep down, we really don't expect others to like us either. So we hide ourselves in busyness, in superficial living, to avoid having to face ourselves. We learn the art of transference when we have those "inadvertent insights" into ourselves- we cast our fault on another to see how they react, how they handle it, in the hopes of learning secondhand how to cope with our firsthand faults...
Meditation, centering down, learning silence can be a profoundly frightening experience. Being alone with ourself, with the only one privy to our silent time being the One who knows our every failing, who reveals ourself to us in our rawest, basest form can be overwhelming to say the least, if we're not ready to deal with the reality of our deepest self. And yet, when we learn to face our fears, our longings, our emptiness, when we trust in the One source to fill the voids in our life, we can begin to experience life at far deeper, far richer level than ever before... The hustle and bustle are no longer important, indeed, we discover that life is in the journey, not in the destination. We discover that all the busyness has kept us from enjoying the journey and when we finally reach our destination there is often a distinct lack of satisfaction with the result. Satisfaction comes when we learn to be content in our journey, when we learn to take time to enjoy the walk... Satisfaction is found in contentment, but contentment isn't dependent on satisfaction... I understand now Paul's words that he'd learned to be content in whatever his circumstance...