The greatest journey

Which names come to us when we think of amazing journeys?

In literature we have the granddaddy of them all, Ulysses and his odyssey. There are the Hobbits, Bilbo and Frodo. Jules Verne and his tales. Gilgamesh. Dante’s Divine Comedy…

In exploring we could have Ibn Battuta, Marco Polo, Leif Erikson, Gertrude Bell, Zheng He… Or if it’s extreme feats we’re thinking of, then there’s Neil Armstrong and the others hurtling to the moon, Victor Vescovo dropping metre by metre into the depths, Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary inching towards the summit of Everest, Preet Chandi skiing across Antarctica…

Every culture has its lore of epic journeys and ways to guide us on our travels. From the mnemonic stories of stars to help us navigate…to the maps etched on cave walls and animal bones…to our phones and our GPS systems.

Much loved by life coaches ever since, Ralph Waldo Emerson said back in 1912 that life is a journey, not a destination. Taking that sense of motion further, we could say we are do-ers, not be-ers. Verbs, not nouns. We can try to freeze ourselves into a single moment capture as the Existentialists would, yet we are more films than photographs.

Journeys always involve working out ways forward, paths not taken, people and places left by the wayside as the traveller turns back time and time again to the set direction, the known left for the unknown. It may sound a grand way to capture our lives, but it’s a helpful way of thinking about ourselves.

Another life coaching favourite has it that we don’t step into the same river twice. As we see our outer world through ever-changing eyes, so our construing of self-identity constantly changes as we undergo new events, learn new knowledge, meet new people, and experience all else that makes our lived world never static.

We don’t see things as they are – we see them as we are

Anais Nin

Distilling all this down into determining a way forward as we sometimes do, most usually after a loss of some nature or the achievement of a goal, we often focus on the destination, not on the way there, and even less on our starting point. Stephen Covey’s mantra of starting with the end in mind is useful only if we recognise that it is but a guiding star, and a destination we may never even get to.

The REALM model is devised to redress this balance. For essentially, our internal conversation around purpose and living fully is really founded on three questions – Who am I? Who do I want to be? How will I be this person?

Yet asking ourselves who we are can send the heebie-jeebies down our spine at any time of the day, let alone lying awake at 3am. Phrasing it as Where am I? is not only easier to get our heads around, but also a truer reflection of our changing nature. Where am I in terms of my values, my strengths, my passions, my influences, and all else?

Similarly, who do I want to be? becomes more practical and concrete if we turn it into Where do I want to go? What is my why, my purpose, my goals, my full me?

And the last becomes quite simply, How will I get there? My map, my resources, my support network, my milestones, my own wellbeing…

Framing these questions in the context of a journey and all we will need on this journey allows us to better focus on the here and now and on the way itself. This is at the core of living fully.

And so again to whose is the greatest journey? Our own, of course.

For more information on the REALM model, the book, and lots of useful resources, check out https://orangecairns.com

Julian

I help people lead their own way forward