It Is Best to See Life as a Journey, Not as a Destination

In 1911 the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, who spent his working life as a clerk in the irrigation service in Alexandria, published a short poem about the island of Ithaka. It addresses a traveller sailing home, as Odysseus did, and advises him to hope that the road is long. The island, the poet says, has already given the traveller his wonderful journey, and it has nothing more to give. When the traveller arrives he will find it poor, but he will have grown wise enough to understand what Ithakas mean. The topic puts the same idea in plain words, that it is best to see life as a journey and not as a destination.

The sentiment is old and widely shared. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote in 1881 that to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and that the true success is to labour. The line is often misattributed to other writers, which perhaps shows how naturally it fits the mind of anyone who has ever reached a long wanted goal and felt less than he expected. The advice runs through the traditions of many peoples, and it is easy to recognise because it matches a common experience.

Indian thought gives it a sharp form. In the second chapter of the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna tells Arjuna that he has a right to action alone and never to its fruits. The instruction does not ask Arjuna to stop caring about the outcome of the war. It asks him to place his attention on the quality of the act, since the result depends on many things that no warrior controls. Buddhism speaks of a path and not a place, and the Sufi poets speak of the way as the thing itself. In each tradition the self is formed by the going, and what lies at the end of the going is less important than what the traveller has become by the time he reaches it.

Psychology supplies the evidence for what the poets knew. People are poor at predicting how long a pleasure will last, and they adapt quickly to good fortune. In 1971 Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell described a hedonic treadmill, in which gains in status or income raise expectations so that the person returns to his earlier level of satisfaction. The psychologist Tal Ben Shahar has called the belief that reaching some goal will bring lasting happiness the arrival fallacy. Olympic athletes, newly promoted executives and students admitted to famous colleges report a hollow quiet after the triumph. The goal had carried a weight of meaning that its achievement could not sustain.

The goal had carried a weight of meaning that its achievement could not sustain.

If so, a life organised entirely around destinations is a life spent waiting. A student who treats school as a corridor to a job, and the job as a corridor to retirement, may find that the corridor was the whole building. Parents who postpone attention to their children until the promotion arrives find that the children have grown. The advice to value the journey is therefore partly a warning about time, since the present is the only part of life that a person ever actually lives in.

Ordinary lives bear this out. Retired people often say that the years they remember most warmly were the years of striving, when the children were small and the money was short and the future was open. The achievement is recalled as a date, but the effort is recalled as a time of life. Farmers who wait for a harvest, students who prepare for an examination and craftsmen who learn a trade over a decade all speak of the labour as the part that shaped them. The destination marks the end of the story, and the journey is the story itself.

Philosophers of the twentieth century carried this further. Albert Camus, in his essay on Sisyphus in 1942, imagined a man condemned to push a boulder up a hill forever, and concluded that one must imagine him happy. The struggle itself, Camus argued, is enough to fill a human heart, because meaning is not delivered by the universe at the end of the road but made by the person who walks it. The existentialists generally held that no destination is given to humanity in advance, and that the traveller must therefore find significance in the way he chooses to go.

Yet the proverb can be pushed too far, and the objections deserve a hearing. A journey without a destination is a drift. Edwin Locke and Gary Latham showed over decades of studies that people who set specific and difficult goals perform better than those who merely try to do their best, and organisations, from the smallest start up to the Indian space programme, depend on targets that give effort direction. The moon landing of 1969 was a destination, and it organised the work of four hundred thousand people. A journey that is valued only for its pleasure would not have produced the rocket.

There is also the plain fact that many journeys are not enjoyable. The refugee who walks for weeks, the patient who endures a long treatment and the labourer who migrates for work cannot be told to love the road. For them the destination is safety, health or wages, and the road is a cost. To praise the journey in such cases is to flatter those who have the luxury of choosing it. It is perhaps wiser to say that the journey and the destination give each other meaning, since the walker who cares nothing for the goal has no reason to walk, and the arrival that has not been earned by the walk feels empty.

A final difficulty lies at the end of every road. Death is the one destination that every life shares, and it cannot be escaped by enjoying the scenery. The advice to see life as a journey may be wise partly because it refuses to look at that arrival. It is hard to know whether this refusal is a form of courage or a way of avoiding what the journey is moving towards, and the traveller on the road, who sees only the next turn, has no way of settling the matter.