Journey vs. Destination

Are you a journey person or a destination person? Do you enjoy the work it takes to get you to a goal, or is the end result the most important thing?

I’m a little of both. More specifically, I’m a destination person who tries like crazy to remember that the journey is important too.

As we train to hike Kilimanjaro, I keep reminding myself to enjoy the preparation we’re doing to get there. And I do. I like to work hard and our training is certainly hard work. Yesterday we hiked 10 hilly miles in 89º weather; this morning found us at our regular strength workout at 6AM. Rinse & repeat for another month until we taper off (or run out of moleskin, whichever comes first!)

So training is the journey to the destination of hiking Kili. But there’s another journey/destination pairing: the actual climb up to the summit.

Take a guess how long we’ll be hiking up the mountain. If you said “a week,” you’re absolutely right. We’ll be hiking up to the summit for seven full days, taking our time to acclimatize.

Guess how long we’ll stay at the summit? A surprising 30 minutes. That’s it. We’ll take 168 hours to get to the top, and enjoy half an hour looking around – 0.3% of our total climbing time will be hanging out at the summit.

This trip is literally all about getting there, with a little bit of being there thrown in for flavor.

It’s like a key life lesson smacking me in the face: most of life is about the journey. The destination is almost incidental. And never guaranteed.

A good friend of mine has a wonderful philosophy about getting to the summit: the mountain decides. So, really, all I have is the journey, playing out one step at a time as I hike my local hills. Hopefully, we’ll get to the top of Kilimanjaro, but if we don’t, we’ve still succeeded. I absolutely believe that.