Journey

Road to the Deep Creek Range, from a journey with Alan, Kevin, and Jonny. Motivational poster fodder.

Human nature makes people who have experienced one or more eras before the current one* tend to dismiss or at least harbor skepticism about changes in their world.

I felt a sharp pang of skepticism when, circa 2014, my brother Rob used the word “journey” to explain how he had arrived at a particular mentality. It stuck in my memory. The skepticism faded right away because the term was apt for what he described: Humans are on a journey. Multiple journeys, in a million aspects of life. Friendship, politics, philosophy, business, marriage, religion, community, language acquisition, and every other thing we might navigate.

(This will feel shopworn to many of you. Writing is part of processing it for me. Maybe it can benefit someone.)

We aren’t all on the same journeys, but we walk common stretches sometimes. You may have reached a certain point on a common stretch that I have yet to reach. Or vice versa. The view from that spot might give you understanding that I can’t yet access. It is nice when you are nice to me in that situation.

Ideally, we have the empathy to recognize that another person is not malicious or derelict, but instead unable to understand a thing yet. They are behind you on this journey. They act accordingly, lacking understanding. The reality of complex, imperfect life is that we judge and roast people in this state. Mind you, judgment does seem appropriate from where I stand on my journey, for people who refuse to move forward in the journey of understanding things.

By nature I’m the clown who progresses minutely ahead in the journey, and straightaway gets high and mighty about his new understanding: “How I tire of this bozo who is not yet in the place I arrived three minutes ago.” This syndrome famously afflicts the student who just encountered some theory for the first time and brandishes it wildly as the be-all, end-all to everything.

As a kid, I did not view my parents and the adults around me as people who were still on journeys. To my mind, they had arrived. In those days, adults rarely portrayed themselves to kids as being on a journey. There was more focus on their status as arrived authorities. It’s understandable. Each society is itself on a journey.

I’m glad things have changed some. The other day, my kid was surprised to hear me share some specific irrational worries that I decided to finally forego in recent months, as a 45-year-old man. That their parent has irrational worries was also a surprise. I shared the concrete success I am seeing from making this late leap.

I shared the view from where I currently stand: When you worry about a possible future bad thing that you can’t control, you are preemptively making yourself unhappy in the present, based on the fallacy that the bad thing will surely happen. If (A) you can’t control it and (B) the probability the bad thing will happen is less than 100%, you’re ensuring unhappiness instead of allowing the possibility of happiness. You’re guaranteed to be less happy than if you hadn’t worried about it.

Caring less about uncontrollable, uncertain things is good. Caring more about controllable, important things is good. I think this was good to share with my kid, even if they already knew that I am imperfect and on a journey.

*What a laborious way to say “old” lol