goodbye home, hello world
i met a very interesting guy last night. his name is Tim Dennis.
we spent an hour in studio (Wed Mar 11 @ 11p) talking about his journey around the world to raise awareness about street kids. his spiritual journey, he called it. not religious … just spiritual. he sold his house in Scotland, rid himself of the burdens of what most of us might consider normal life (the mortgage, the debt, the sometimes-meaningless routine) and set out to inspire. he’s been living out of his truck and off the kindness of others, couch to couch, in an effort to help kids find a better way.
and he says he’s a normal guy. no better than anyone else, he says. anyone can do this, he says. i don’t disagree, but i wonder how much we want to.
oh sure, i firmly believe that deep within all of us is a desire to change the world (or at least our part of it), but there are so many ways we fight that desire. each day, we find new ways to push it down, down further, when we should be coaxing it to spring up and gush out around us:
• work
• marriage
• kids
• hobbies
• commitments
none of these are bad things. some are necessary. but all them can and should contribute to stoking that desire, rather than extinguishing it.
everyone one of us is on a spiritual journey. rarely will it involve selling our homes and setting out across this great globe with little more than wheels and a pillow (and sometimes not even that), but would you do that if you could? or if you felt you could? we’ve heard it before — life is all about the journey — but why we do allow ourselves to get caught up in the mundane, to convince ourselves that meaningless distractions are so important, to believe that what we do doesn’t matter, or even to put religious destination ahead of the spiritual journey?
Tim Dennis isn’t perfect, but he took the first step.
that’s a start.
I’m not sure where I stand on the maxim of life being a journey, destination unimportant.
I’ve taken to the roads with a backpack and done the physical journey for the sake of the journey, which is great fun, but in the end I’m not sure how (mentally) sustainable a journey is without a destination.
In Tim Dennis’ case, there is a purpose to his journey, so every time he is able to raise awareness of street kids, he’s reaching a destination (or at least a way point).
In The Great Divorce, by C.S. Lewis, there is an exchange which got me thinking about this the other day:
Man 1: “To travel hopefully is better than to arrive.”
Man 2: “If that were true, and known to be true, how could anyone travel hopefully? There would be nothing to hope for.”
I think both the journey and the destination are important, though I don’t know right now which one is the most important…