SUMMARY HERE

To this day all I want to reach is the destination. No matter what that destination is: finishing a book, finishing a project, getting to a new city, being happy. But the reality is that once I reach that destination all I want to do is move on to the next thing. I don’t even give myself the time to enjoy my acheivement. I don’t take the time to enjoy the destination because I’m already bored with the result. I know I’m not alone in this, either. I see it all the time from YouTubers who talk about hitting a certain subscriber count and just continue to move the goal post, not taking the time to appreciate what they just acheived.

It’s astounding just how fast we can move on to the next thing without a secong thought. Quite sad when you really down to think about it. The worst part is, too, is that we can’t even enjoy the journey to the destination. We want to speed-run every step of the process so that we can acheive the thing as soon as possible. Are we really enjoying anything at that point? Are we even conscious of what we’re actually doing with our time, or are we just letting life kind of happen to us without another thought?

Not to mention just how fast we seem to get bored with things and craving the next “shiny object” when we’ve barely started the current thing. That, or we just let our minds wander to other things that we “need” to do that day or things that are just in the recesses over our mind. For example, I’ll be reading a book and at some point I’ll inevitably start thinking about my grocery list even if I’m in some intense scene that’s important to the plot of the story. It’s agravating to say the least. But, I can’t seem to help myself. Or, I hit a really boring section in whatever book I’m reading and I start flipping the next few pages to see how much I have left of that chapter so I can calculate how much longer I have to “suffer” through the current scene. These are scenarios that I’m sure many people are familiar with and it’s hard and frustrating to break these “habits”.

One of the things I’ve been trying to do recently is just accepting that those things are going to happen. I accept that my mind will wander and that there will be boring parts to the book I’m reading. And that’s okay. There’s no need to rush through the story just to get to the cool bits. I slow myself down and tell myself to enjoy the journey that is reading the book. Read word-by-word and not scan the page. Slow down and enjoy the story, the characters, the world. I don’t NEED to get to the end as fast as possible because it’s not a race. Additionally, I have to tell myself that there’s no way I can remember everything that happens in the book if I read it fast and don’t absorb what’s going on. It’s the journey, not the destination.

I’ve been trying to carry this mentality into other aspects of my life as well.