** The most profound journey is not one that involves traveling to exotic lands, but rather the path of unfolding discovery that allows us to clearly see what is always and forever right in front of us. **
When I was very young, maybe eight or nine, something extraordinary happened. But it wasn’t in the form of an event in time or a notable experience. It was instead something that just sort of arrived on the scene unheeded and didn’t ever depart: curiosity took me by the throat and wouldn’t let loose.
What a glorious friend
to have, and she went everywhere with me. “What is this; why is that; how does
this thing connect to that other thing?” she would whisper. “What are all those
things that are not plain to the sight and which remain unseen?” was her higher-level
examination question. This urge to look under every rock simmered for a while,
but at some point it boiled over, and its beckoning call would eventually dictate
the arc of my young life.
Yes, such a brilliant guide to have, growing
up as I did in the segregated South with all sorts of inherited assumptions
about race, gender, class, acceptable behavior and supposed success. One day,
sitting in a classroom at Myers Park High School, a thought arrived in my mind stream,
“They haven’t told us everything.” I knew at once that the way I was being
educated by the society around me could not be the be-all and end-all.
But where to turn? Who would know whatever it
is that “they” haven’t told us? The books and professors at my university were
a support along the way, but my search wasn’t satisfied by learned lectures. “Well,
the folks up north at those prestigious universities, maybe they know.” Not really.
“Well, maybe it is in Europe; they’ll know what it is.” But it was more of not
really knowing, just with a different accent.
Fortunately, the loyal
sister of curiosity is persistence. Looking, looking, looking—being intensely
interested, picking up each rock, examining it carefully, not finding what was
being sought, putting the rock back down and going to the next one. Over and
over again, and again, and again. Lots of questions, thousands of books, many
stamps in a passport, numerous brilliant conversations, endless retreats and
meditation sessions . . .
As I move into old age, there is not one speck
of regret for any of that, because you see, I have been allowed an insight. Every
bit of my seeking and longing has led me to where I am today: clarity that this
journey I have been on is not to a place, or a state of mind, or to a finish
line where there is total certainty. No, none of that. I walk in different
shoes now.
The most profound
journey is the path of unfolding discovery that allows us to clearly see what
is always and forever right in front of us. A key part of this discovery is becoming
aware of the miseducation which initiated us into a confused world of hearsay
and misperception. In seeing this, we can relax our grip on all the misbegotten
concepts and presuppositions that have solidified in our lives. We become
humble enough to not-know-but-what-to-know. We are alert to what teaching each
moment brings, and we are courageous enough to heed what is being revealed. No
goal, no destination—no travel needed, no further knowledge required. Resting
as pristine primordial awareness for short moments many times, we are all
already fully arrived.
