Why there is no end station

I recently had the pleasure of long conversations about everything deep and meaningful with a friend I’ve known for a while. We are both seekers and self-improvers, observers and always striving to have something touch our hearts and bring us joy.

While we have a different set of meanings to different areas of life, we both have areas of life that seem to have gained an unproportionally big role in happiness, elevating above the rest. For me this has been work, or rather, finding work that feels meaningful and fitting for me. This search has become such an important issue for me, the END STATION, that I loose my cool if (and when) I don’t seem to find it. I search and analyze why every choice I make ends up being ‘not IT’ and the pressure builds up. When do I arrive, when can I stop looking?

For some people this is finding the perfect body/health or perhaps finding the one true love. But there seems to always be something within that feels like ‘if I only had this figured out, I would be complete and life would be awesome.’

But there is no end station. Nothing will be IT. Nothing will magically fit forever, nothing is permanent and stable. We are not stable and permanent, and neither is life. And this is not a bad thing.

Flexibility with the journey

I am pretty flexible with many things in my life. I know friendships are not forever, and I accept that. I have let go of the idea that one love should be with me forever. I am perfectly happy with my perfect-love-right-now, and at the same time I know it may not be forever. I hope it will be, but I will not hold on to it for dear life in case we realize at some point down the line that it’s time to move on. It will not devastate me, because I love it now, it fits me now, and that’s enough.

So why am I so hopelessly rigid and searching for THE ONE with my work? As if one magic employment will make me happy forever, as if one job would make me feel like I have a purpose in life. Why can’t I accept that this is it, the journey, the different experiences I keep having, and that’s as fitting and final as it gets. Why can’t I look at it with the same openness as I look at love, or any other thing I let freely come and go?

Well, maybe I can now, since I see it differently. Maybe I could allow some light and space into my professional life, and maybe I will stop taking it so seriously. When I think of my dream, or going after my dreams, I realize that perhaps I am living my dream after all. It does not mean every day is dreamy, by far not, but at least I have the freedom in life to change things around, to do different things and jump from one experience to another.

Maybe that was my dream all along.