Reblogged from Besonian:

To recap two of my earlier posts on the same subject – do you wonder what this is all about – this life? That’s of course, if it’s about anything at all. All the rushing here, rushing there, have I done this, that, everything I have to do? Will I catch the train, the bus, the plane? Where’s my ticket?? Have the kids got everything for school? Come on! We’re going to be late – and no, we can’t afford that – the mortgage is due this week, and the gas bill, and my dentist’s, and it’s nearly Christmas and I still haven’t got a present for – oh, God – what is the point?

We go about life like everything we do has to have a point, some more or less desirable end result – even life itself needs to have a point. As a result, our minds are so much of the time set on the future. ‘My goal is…’, ‘What I want to achieve is…’, ‘My dream is to become….’ And once I’ve arrived at that magic point then, so the assumption goes, I will be happy and fulfilled. Then what?

I’ve never climbed a mountain – at least, not a physical, geographical one –  but isn’t it a bit like that? Once at the summit, what then? Clearly, an enormous, exhilarating sense of achievement; a while spent in wonder at the view from the top of the world; taking photographs; then the turn around and the long trek back down. You wouldn’t want to sit on the summit for ever. The mountain has now to be consigned to that thing called memory. And memory is notoriously unreliable. With time, it fades into the mist; bits of it simply disappear; its chronology becomes doubtful, often impossible to disentangle with any certainty.

What doesn’t seem to fade however is the joy you had – however difficult, challenging, painful it may all have been – in getting there. That seems, in some indefinable way, to be still with you; to have contributed something permanent to some inner part of you.

Continue reading at Besonian