Pilgrimage

Pilgrimage, Mark Tedman

Monday September 9th, 2024

I like the idea of seeing life as a pilgrimage. A quest to reveal the meaning of a life. Some lives it seems are imbued with a clear sense of purpose, or destination, from the get-go. Not me, it seems. It has been a somewhat haphazard journey. A series of intuitive steps, following what looked interesting, worth exploring. Only now making some sense of what has driven the ups and downs, the twists and the turns.

When we think of a 'pilgrimage', we often think of a journey to a holy place, a spiritual quest of some sort; the Camino. A journey filled with hardships and obstacles. Challenges and personal growth. It's not just about reaching a physical destination but also about the transformation encountered along the way. When you see your life as a pilgrimage, you begin to understand it as a series of significant steps, each contributing to your personal and spiritual development. Each challenge testing your resilience, shaping your character.

For me a turning point was recognising a certain meaninglessness in what I was doing. A sense that my potential might have been slipping through my fingers. Revealed by a serendipitous glimpse of what it could be. How I could be. An immediate intuition of how I could place myself at the intersection of talent and contribution. A stage I could step onto and be fully myself. A chance to work and rejoice in the human spirit.

Looking back I can, only now, discern a thread. Part the immediate, profane necessity of earning a living. Providing for my young family. Part an insatiable curiosity of looking beneath the surface, asking why. And looking beyond how things showed up, sensing new possibilities and asking why not? Feeling a responsibility to help shepherd the new into the world. To help make the latent, the invisible, manifest. The quest from earning a living to living a vocation. Mistakenly thinking 'the new' only lay outside myself. Only now, after 40 years, realising that work can lay within. This a quest to also bring myself anew, joyfully, into a world that is as alive as I am.

What has brought you to life on your journey so far? And what is bringing you to life right now? And how might this consciousness shape where are you headed?