Journey Law # 17

...Your Journey has brought you to this place and these people, your fellow sojourners. Think of their Journeys as well as your own. Don’t miss the opportunities for learning and growth represented by this assembly of fellow souls. 

Cynthia F. Davidson, from Wisdom Wheel Law of the Journey card

(see www.thewisdomwheel.com to order cards, posters or stones)

Now comes the Journey Law, just as we reach the halfway point, on this 'tour' round the Wheel with its 36 Laws. 
What has your Journey meant to you so far? 

During the next ten days, consider the inner Journeys you've made, as well your outer ones, into the larger world. Emotional and spiritual Journeys are every bit as significant as intellectual and physical ones. 

Take the time to describe your life Journey (thus far). Write about in your journal. The word Journey comes from the French word jour for day. It refers to the distance traveled in a single day. Evaluate your Journey as a whole by deciding its value as you add up your years and how they've gone. 

What makes life worth living, in your opinion? How are you spending your precious allotment of days on this Earth? 

Have you chosen the 'safe route'? Or are you taking the road less traveled, as immortalized in Robert Frost's poem? 

Just be sure it's your Journey you are making, not someone else's idea of what's expected. Ask others to share what they've learned, at home and at work, about the Journey and their sense of it, so far. 

Where do you want to go next? By the time you are an Elder, where would you like to be? Destinations are important but not as much as our movements towards them. We don't know when our Journeys will end, but we can aim in a general Direction. Some say, if you take the road toward wholeness, your Journey will always be worth it.

Here's some advice from those who've thought about their Journeys. 

To journey without being changed is to be a nomad.

To change without journeying is to be a chameleon.

To journey and to be transformed by the journey is to be a pilgrim.

Mark Nepo in The Book of Awakening

Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.

Matsuo Basho

 A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it…

A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.

John Steinbeck, American author, books include The Grapes of Wrath

The best day of your life is the one on which you decide your life is your own. No apologies or excuses. No one to lean on, rely on, or blame. The gift is yours - it is an amazing journey - and you alone are responsible for the quality of it. This is the day your life really begins.

Bob Moawad, American author, Whatever It Takes: A Journey Into the Heart of Human Achievement

Come dress yourself in love and let the journey begin.

Francesca da Rimini

Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are travelling the dark journey with us. Oh be swift to love, make haste to be kind.

Henri Frederic Amiel

It requires greater courage to preserve inner freedom, to move on in one's inward journey into new realms, than to stand defiantly for outer freedom. It is often easier to play the martyr, as it is to be rash in battle.

Rollo May

I had become, with the approach of night, once more aware of loneliness and time - those two companions without whom no journey can yield us anything.

Lawrence Durrell

Real adventure – self-determined, self-motivated, often risky – forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind – and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and-white.

Mark Jenkins

Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.

Paul Theroux

He who does not travel knows not the value of men.

Moorish proverb

There are no foreign lands. It is only the traveler who is foreign.

Robert Louis Stevenson

There comes a time in the spiritual journey when you start making choices from a very different place.... And if a choice lines up so that it supports truth, health, happiness, wisdom and love, it’s the right choice.

Angeles Arrien

The spiritual journey does not consist in arriving at a new destination where a person gains what he did not have, or becomes what he is not. It consists in the dissipation of one’s own ignorance concerning one’s self and life, and the gradual growth of that understanding which begins the spiritual awakening. The finding of God is a coming to one’s self.

Aldous Huxley

After one arrives at the summit, after going through the total transformation of being, there is yet one more step to the completion of the journey; the return to the valley below, to the everyday world.  Who it is that returns is not the one who began the climb in the first place.  The being who comes back is quietness itself, is compassion and wisdom, is the truth of the ages.  Whatever humble or elevated position that being holds within the community, he or she becomes a light for others on the way, a statement of freedom that comes from having touched the tip of the mountain.

Ram Dass in the Journey of Awakening

In ten days we’ll move on to the 18th Law of Forgiveness. Until then, enjoy all your Journey has to offer.