Focusing on the Journey

Today is Wednesday, August 28, 2013.

"Focus on the journey, not the destination.  Joy is found not in finishing an activity, but in doing it."  –Greg Anderson

Back in 1984, Greg Anderson was diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer and given 30 days to live.  He refused to accept this diagnosis, and began to look for people who had survived so-called "terminal" cancer.  He found them, and interviewed over 16,000 survivors.  The information he got from them forms the basis for an international cancer survivor movement.  Anderson founded the Cancer Recovery Foundation of America and went on to write a number of books, including The Cancer Conqueror: An Incredible Journey to Wellness, The 22 Non-Negotiable Laws of Wellness: Feel, Think and Live Better than You Ever Thought Possible, and Living Life on Purpose: A Guide to Creating a Life of Success and Significance.

Having been on a "cancer journey" of my own, I can attest that one important ingredient in survival is re-focusing on the process, and not the products, of life.  It's not how much you get done, how much you produce, how much you earn.  It's how you live your life and how you interact with others that is important.

Here's another quote by Anais Nin:  "Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death."

When we see our lives as an ongoing process, we can never say that we have arrived.  There is always another place to go, another thing to do.  No matter what the situation may look like, we are never at the end, only somewhere along the way.  We cannot rest on our laurels; neither can we afford to wallow in the mire of our failures.  Like the great white shark, for whom inactivity means death, we must keep moving. 

A couple of years ago, I thought that I would just figure out a routine once I retired and stick to it, and that would be it.  Wrong.  I see that retirement is simply another state of being, and that my life continues to change and morph rapidly.  More to come.  :-)