Life's Pilgrimage

"To finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step of the road... is wisdom"

- Ralp Waldo Emerson

I'm a bit late in posting my blog article of the week because I've have been busy tackling family obligations and now I'm on a short trip to Johor Bahru to visit an ailing aunt. I'm stealing a bit of time at this Coffee Bean outlet here at the KSL Mall to record the whatever random thoughts that bubble up. The Chamomile tea puts me in a relaxed mood and hopefully, I'll be able to churn up some decent writing.

Sometimes it is good to break out from one's regular habits to see life from a slightly different perspective. Come to think of it, I haven't travelled at all for the last, perhaps 8 years, since my last trip to Dhaka, Bangladesh. I caught an executive bus down to Johor Bahru last evening and arrived here right after midnight.  The feeling of checking into a hotel and sleeping in a strange hotel room, actually brings back many fond memories of all the time that I had spent living on the road, outside Malaysia.

For some people, the single life can be the most depressingly lonely kind of existence. But strangely to me, it only gives me a feeling of self-sufficiency and contentment.  The hotel room here is a basically a larger version of the one I had stayed for 2 years, as a long-term guest in Jakarta, more than 20 years ago (!). I recorded why I felt so happy staying there then in this blog article, written then. That phase of my life has passed but I am still the same person, a contented and happy being...perhaps, a spiritual nomad now?

The cliche "life is a journey, not a destination", often misattributed to Emerson  carries a much deeper insight. It is not just a journey to me, it is a pilgrimage. A pilgrimage is a journey undertaken to reach a spiritual site--the birthplace or tomb of saints or any other locations deemed 'holy' through associations with prophets and spiritual teachers. What makes a journey a pilgrimage is actually not the destination, but the process of reaching it, which in the days before jet travel, involving a lot of danger and hardship. 

A pilgrimage is like a walking meditation because you have an overriding spiritual goal, but at any moment in time, you have to focus on the task at hand--the discomforts of your journey, the threat of being robbed or lost and the ever-present possibility of death, away from the safe comforts of your home. It is the process of overcoming all these obstacles that constitutes the pilgrimage. The destination is just the cherry on the cake, at the end. The real reward is the inner transformation of the traveller. 

All great sagas, epitomising the Hero's Journey, are in essence pilgrimages -- for example, Lord of the Rings, The Odyssey, Divine Comedy and the Pilgrim's Progress.  the protagonist undergoes a lot of hardship in his journey, which ultimately changes him. 

You don't have to physically travel anywhere to go on a pilgrimage. Your life is already a pilgrimage--towards Death. Whatever challenges or hardship that you go through in life are meant to transform you for the better. So take them head-on; suffer the pain consciousness and be grateful for whatever blessings that come your way, because they help to nourish you on this journey. 

You don't have to join the hip crowd and hitch-hike to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Spain to declare to the world via Instagram that you are on a spiritual pilgrimage. Your life is already one, and we are all fellow pilgrims.