Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Dual purpose for Life's Journey

Each of our life journeys has an inner purpose and an outer purpose. The outer purpose is to arrive at our goal, or destination. I believe that I have been primarily focused throughout the years on the outer purpose. But a book I am reading is offering new insight to the dual purpose of life's journey (The book is: "The Power of Now" by Eckhart Tolle). The author brings to light that if the destination takes up so much of our attention that it becomes more important than each individual daily step, then we are missing the journey's inner purpose "which has nothing to with where you are going or what you are doing but everything to do with how." So in essence, the journey is not about getting to some "future" point, but the quality of each individual, intentional moment along the path. The author makes a clear distinction between the outer and inner purposes of the journey. The outer portion "may contain a million steps, your inner journey only has one: the step you are taking right now."
Fascinating. This changes certainly the way I have been looking at my journey... I always knew it was not just about the destination, but this goes beyond that... I need to give this whole thing some more thought!


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