It's All About the Journey

Naturalgal had an interesting post up yesterday in which she talks about plugging along with things like weight loss or psych-med withdrawal, and Gianna had a post up the other day where she discussed dealing with pain, whether it be physical or emotional. Both of these posts have something to say about process vs. product, journey vs. destination.

So often, we focus on the Next Big Goal, whether it be losing thirty pounds, becoming medication-free or pain-free, buying our dream home, getting a new job, or whatever it happens to be. So focused that we forget about the journey--how we get there and what we do along the way.

When you're losing weight, the goal is to be fit and trim, but what so many people don't seem to realize is that reaching the goal isn't enough--if you've crashed the weight off, you haven't learned better habits along the way, and you aren't going to be able to maintain your ideal weight for very long. It makes more sense to shift your perspective to the journey and learn healthy habits that you can maintain for a lifetime. It's a slower process, but the results will be long-term.

The same applies to coming off of psych meds. The goal is to be medication free, and it may seem that the fastest way to achieve that is to just stop taking the medication. However, doing that can be dangerous, and withdrawal symptoms can leave you worse off than when you started. It's important to go slowly and allow your body time to adjust. Gianna has some excellent resources for psychiatric drug withdrawal at her blog, Beyond Meds.

As far as pain goes, focusing on how long it will be until the pain goes away can make the whole process seem so much worse. If you can shift your focus to making it through this moment, somehow that's not as hard to manage as making it through the next hour, or until the pain meds kick in, or until the headache is gone. I've used this shift of focus to help get me through the most horrendous migraines, and it does help.

What I'm really talking about here is mindfulness--being fully present in the moment rather than focusing solely on what's going to happen at some future time.

I have a friend who is always thinking about the Next Big Thing, which, of course, is going to make her life perfect. And when the Next Big Thing arrives and fails to do so, she is disappointed...until she decides what the next Next Big Thing is. She lives her life in the grip of a never-ending cycle of anticipation and disappointment. Sometime in the future when she's sitting on the front porch in her rocker covered with grandchildren, I wonder what she will remember about her life. That everything was a disappointment?

I would rather recall a series of moments, lived for what they are, than a series of disappointments.