With pretty much anything you do, time is going to move quickly
The final thing I do to psyche myself up to take the journey is to remind myself that pretty much no matter how I spend my time: it’s going to go fast.
Time moves fast, and it moves faster as you get older. It’s a cliché, but its massive amount of use doesn’t detract from its accuracy. And it can be very useful to think about when you’re pondering that first step along the road.
Right now think of somewhere you’d like to visit, something you’d like to be good at, something you want to make or something you want to achieve. If you didn’t have a journey in mind when you came to this article, think of one now.
Got one? Now think back to this time last year. What were you doing? Can you remember? If you can’t it’s because it was so long ago, but, at the same time, doesn’t May 2007 seem pretty recent?
12 months is a long enough period in which to make huge progress in any area – yet it’s also a period which passes amazingly quickly. There’s nothing quite like realising what you were doing this time last year and going: “whoa…that was a year ago?”
Now think about where you would be now if you had started that journey this time last year. How far would you be along? How would you be different? What would you have? How would you think? For some of the best journeys those last three questions will be applicable. It’s strange to imagine that you might even be a slightly different person today if you just started and stayed with that journey this time last year.
I left university yesterday and as my dad and I gradually cleared out my room it was the first time since I’d moved in that the room was restored to its original blank state. It was a hot sunny windless day when I moved into that room in September and it was a hot sunny windless day when I left.
Seven months had passed (university ‘years’, in the UK are at least, are really short). But seeing the room stripped bare wasn’t strange: it was familiar. I felt like it was a week or so ago since I’d seen the room like that. So much has happened between then and now…yet it hasn’t taken long at all.
For some reason while we marvel at how quickly time has gone we still think of the future as taking ages to get to. Your future self in a year (or five years or ten years and so on and so on) is going to look back on now and saw “wow…I can’t believe how long ago that was – it’s just feels so recent.”
Once you appreciate that, you’ll have even less reserve about the journey. It may be a long one but you won’t look back on it and feel that it took a long time.
And once all that time has gone by in the blink of an eye...
Do some journeys never end? Well, apparently that’s the case. In foreign languages, for example, Barry Farber – fluent speaker of something like 18 languages, said that you never reach a point in any language at which you can say you’ve mastered it. You can just get better and better at them.
Black belt Karate practitioners, from Gichin Funakoshi to Robert Sullivan, say that the learning of Karate is never complete.
I’ve read of a great poet who, on his deathbed, said mournfully that he’d realised that he had just touched the tip of the iceberg about his art and that there was so much more to learn.
I call all of this thinking ‘irritating wise sage syndrome’ 
It’s jarring to hear that you’ll never feel that you’ve ‘made it’. That the mountain just goes on and on and that you climb one vertical mile just so you can climb the next one – but it goes well with the ‘time goes fast’ truth and it isn’t depressing once you think about it properly.
Beyond point ‘Z’
I think it’s quite rare that someone takes up Karate without the intent to be kick-ass good at it. You take to Karate because you want to become a black belt.
And in every style I’ve ever heard of that thinking is not just okay: it’s encouraged. The black belt is this distant and somewhat obscure icon that is often spoken of and always revered. Some senseis more or less tell their students that they are there to get black belts. That’s it. Self-defence, fitness, flexibility, pleasure – all acknowledged as good things that come about as side benefits in pursuit of the far more important goal: the black belt. If this sounds a bit nuts to you, you’re on the right lines.
Because that really doesn’t make sense when there are Karate-ka with black belts that continue to practice Karate.
Let’s go back to the journey analogy, one last time.
What happens for many a traveller, I guess, is that they’re first lured to their journey by the desirable destination.
On their way to that destination they find they really enjoy the travelling. Once they reach that destination though, they don’t feel much different. Once they’ve ‘made it’ they understand that they got that far because they can enjoy the journey for the journey’s sake, and so they keep going. They’re still making progress and people are more impressed by them than ever – but they now understand that they’re not really doing it to get to the new point they set for themselves.
So, after this trilogy of articles on plucking up the courage to start your journey I want to point out that reaching the destination will not make you live happily ever after, though it’s easy to think that way.
Just being in your better place won’t necessarily make you happier than you are now, it’s the reaching of it that energises you, fulfils you and makes you happier and happier. This is the elusive and hard to believe fourth motivator, and it’s the most important of all.
After all, this website is about reaching your better place, not being there.
Check out the other articles in this series: Part 1, Part 2.
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