Midweek Pause: Nowhere

“One of the beauties of Nowhere is that you never know where you’ll end up when you head in its direction, and though the horizon is unlimited, you may have very little sense of what you’ll see along the way. The deeper blessing is that it can get you as wide-awake, exhilarated, and pumping-hearted as when you are in love.”

—Pico Iyer, “Adventures in Going Nowhere”

Consider: all the careful strategizing that is applied to plans, plans to get somewhere with your career, your relationship, your life. It’s always about forward movement. Our western culture is all about setting sights and attaining goals. What if your plan was to move, to grow, yet with no particular destinations insight. What if all of our thinking about goal setting was really leading us down the wrong path? What if rather than moving we wanted to merely expand?

Do: find a time this week when you can truly experience this freedom of going nowhere, of just opening yourself to the limitless riches the Universe can offer. This can be done by practicing unattachement which, very different from not caring, involves releasing preconceived ideas of an outcome. So, how can one practice this on a daily basis when we do have real imposed deadlines and schedules and places to be? Well, it can be done just like this: walking into a meeting in order to hear others instead of being heard; arriving home to the family and flowing with what is already in progress; or carving out time to spend with your partner or child without an agenda. It’s addicting! This “going nowhere” may actually be the start of a very good habit.