Are We There Yet?

There may be no phrase more universally associated with the family road trip than this one:

Are we there yet?

You can hear it, can’t you?

A child tucked into the back seat of a station wagon, perhaps somewhere between the thermos, the cooler, the pillows, the paper map, and whatever snacks survived the first twenty miles.

“Are we there yet?”

“No.”

Five minutes later:

“Are we there yet?”

“No.”

A few miles farther:

“How about now?”

It is the great refrain of childhood travel.

And increasingly, I think it may also be the great refrain of the spiritual path.

We simply dress it up a little.

Have I awakened yet?

Have I ascended?

Have I healed?

Have I cleared enough?

Have I learned to effortlessly communicate across the veil?

Am I finally living in alignment?

Have I raised my vibration sufficiently?

Have I reached enlightenment?

Am I there yet?

For all our talk about being “on the path,” there is often a secret—or perhaps not-so-secret—assumption underneath it:

The path is supposed to take us somewhere.

Somewhere called Awakened.

Somewhere called Healed.

Somewhere called Enlightened.

Somewhere called Ascended.

Some imagined spiritual destination where, if we do enough work, read enough books, attend enough retreats, meditate enough hours, clear enough ancestral patterns, and faithfully complete enough courses, eventually someone will hand us the metaphysical equivalent of a diploma.

Congratulations.

You have arrived.

Surely there must be a certificate. Right?

But where, exactly, is there?

That is the question I find increasingly interesting.

Because the moment we begin trying to define our spiritual destination, it becomes remarkably slippery and elusive.

Is enlightenment the destination?

Perfect inner peace?

Permanent nonreactivity?

Complete healing?

Absolute certainty?

Unbroken communion with the Divine?

And if we reached such a place, what would happen next?

Would consciousness simply plant a little flag on the mountaintop and say:

Well done. Nothing more to see here.

I truly hope not.

Perhaps part of the problem is that we live in a culture built around completions.

We graduate from high school.

We graduate from college.

We earn qualifications.

We complete training.

We reach benchmarks.

We attain goals.

We cross things off lists.

Then, almost without realizing it, we import that same architecture into spirituality.

Beginner.

Intermediate.

Advanced.

Master.

Initiate.

5D.

Ascended.

Enlightened.

Somewhere along the way, we require the infinite Mystery to hold a graduation ceremony.

We want to move the tassel from one side to the other.

Yet even the language of education contains a wonderfully revealing clue.

We graduate with a degree.

The operative word being degree.

A degree of understanding.

Not Understanding, with a capital U.

Not the absolute knowledge of everything there is to know.

A degree.

A measure.

A portion.

A particular depth of understanding within an immeasurably larger field.

Medicine offers another useful clue.

We call it the practice of medicine.

Not the perfection of medicine.

Not the completion of medicine.

The practice.

There is humility hidden inside that word.

Perhaps spirituality deserves the same humility.

We speak of a meditation practice, a yoga practice, a contemplative practice—not because we expect to perfect them, but because we return to them again and again.

Perhaps spiritual seeking is not something we complete.

Perhaps it is something we practice.

Perhaps it is not a curriculum designed to deliver us to a final destination, but an ever-deepening relationship with Mystery itself…with earned “degrees” of understanding.

And that changes the road trip considerably.

Because, of course, there are stops along the way.

There are rest stops.

There are lunch breaks.

There are lookout points.

There are those extraordinary moments when something we have wrestled with for years suddenly becomes clear.

There are seasons when we realize we have become less reactive, more compassionate, more discerning, or more comfortable inside our own skin (this one took me a long time!).

There are times when the view opens before us and we can suddenly see farther than we could before.

Those moments matter.

Growth is real.

Wisdom is real.

Healing is real.

Transformation is real.

But a lookout point is not necessarily the destination.

Neither is a rest stop.

Neither is lunch.

And heaven knows, neither is the bathroom break.

There are also detours.

Wrong turns.

Road construction.

Flat tires.

Storms.

Periods when we cannot see ten feet in front of us.

And the occasional humbling realization that we have been confidently driving twenty miles in the wrong direction.

Been there. Done that.

All of this belongs to the journey too.

I wonder whether one of the most liberating things we might do is stop treating those experiences as interruptions in our spiritual development.

Perhaps they are our spiritual development.

The inconvenient parts.

The confusing parts.

The challenging parts.

The “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing” parts.

The seasons when we feel certain we are going backward.

The moments when the map no longer matches the road or the GPS insists we head in a direction we are certain is the wrong one.

At this point in my own spiritual road trip, I have become increasingly fond of traveling without a rigid itinerary.

Not a trip without intention.

Not a trip without discernment.

But a trip without the compulsive need to arrive somewhere specific.

Because if we truly consider what it means to be a seeker, there is an inherent paradox in wanting desperately to reach the end of seeking.

If I arrive at the final answer, I am no longer seeking.

If I completely understand Mystery, it is no longer Mystery.

If there is nothing left to discover, curiosity has nowhere left to go.

And what a terrible bargain that would be.

Perhaps genuine spiritual maturity is not the acquisition of certainty.

Perhaps it is an increasing capacity to remain alive inside the questions.

To become more comfortable with the horizon, without the obsessive need to reach it.

To discover that knowing and wondering are not opposites.

That wisdom does not require us to close the book.

That a person may become profoundly grounded while still saying:

What if?

In fact, perhaps one of the signs that we are growing is that the unknown becomes larger rather than smaller.

When we begin, we may imagine that the purpose of spiritual inquiry is to collect answers.

Then, somewhere along the road, if we’re lucky, something peculiar happens.

Every answer opens three more doors.

Every summit reveals another mountain range.

Every genuine insight enlarges our awareness of how much we do not know.

And rather than being discouraging, that can become exhilarating.

Because then the journey stops being something we must endure in order to reach the destination.

The journey becomes the place where Life is actually happening.

Perhaps this is what the child in the back seat eventually learns.

At first, she wants only to arrive.

She barely notices what is outside the window.

Mountains pass.

Rivers appear and disappear.

Clouds throw shadows across enormous fields.

Small towns drift by.

A hawk circles above the highway.

But she is too busy asking:

“Are we there yet?”

Then something catches her attention.

Maybe the mountains turn gold in the late afternoon.

Maybe a herd of elk appears beside the road.

Maybe she sees snow on a distant peak in the middle of July.

And for a while, the question stops.

Not because the car has arrived.

But because she has finally noticed the view.

Perhaps that is the invitation for all of us.

Not to stop growing.

Not to stop seeking.

Not to pretend that every road leads somewhere useful.

But to loosen our grip on the imagined finish line.

To take the scenic route now and then.

To stop at the lookout point.

To eat lunch.

To stretch our legs.

To talk with friendly strangers.

To ask better questions.

To become a little less preoccupied with whether we have spiritually “arrived” and a little more interested in what this particular mile of the journey is asking us to notice.

So…

Are we there yet?

I hope not.

There is still so much to see.

What if?

Cheryl A. Page

“You mustn’t confuse the way you came for the way you will go. The path is in yourself, and you don’t even need a bridge.” — Chao-Hsiu Chen, The Master