Life is a Journey

As I walked a nearby avenue, I came upon a house with a handicap ramp leading from the street to the front door. At the beginning of the ramp was a little plaque. It was at eye level, if your eyes were in a wheelchair. Inscribed upon it were inspirational messages like “Seize the day” and “Live your dreams”. In the center was the largest message: “Life is a journey.”

Life is a journey: a journey that doesn’t require an airplane, a bus, a train, or an RV; a journey you can make in a jail cell, in a monastic cell, even in a wheelchair. 

Most of us don’t know where we’re going and haven’t thought much about where we’ve come from. We may be vaguely aware that as time goes by we change, or are changed. We become different people than we once were. We know that a “that was then, this is now” kind of evolution is happening to us. But how does knowing that help us?

I hear all of you out there: “Tell us, VirtualWayne, what is our life’s journey? Where are we going? What is our destination? What is our purpose in life?”

Calm down, dear readers. I, VirtualWayne, have an answer for you.

The purpose of your life’s journey is to make you a polished diamond. Right now, you’re a diamond in the rough. Some of us are very rough; you’d never guess there was a diamond inside. Some of us are fortunate to have a few shining facets. But regardless, life’s purpose is to make glittering, polished diamonds of each of us. Let me say that again: Life’s purpose is to make us perfect, transparent, multi-faceted diamonds, filled with fire and shining with brilliance. That’s what life is trying to do for us. Most of us have a long, long way to go.

Have you seen how a rock collector polishes rocks to bring out their inner beauty? He uses a rock tumbler. Plain-looking rocks are placed in it, water and abrasive grit are added, and the rocks are tumbled for days. Then the grit is replaced by finer grit and the rocks are again tumbled for days. The process repeats with progressively finer abrasive. From one day to the next, the rocks hardly change in appearance; it appears nothing much is happening. But after a month or more of tumbling against rocks and grit, the rocks are removed from the tumbler. Now they are smooth. They are polished. Their beauty is revealed. Even diamonds require an abrasive to become polished: the abrasive is diamond dust, the hardest abrasive of all.

Trials and tribulations: grit and diamond dust.

Never beat yourself up for not being perfect. If you were perfect, you wouldn’t need to be here in this rock tumbler with the rest of us. And know that your life’s journey is slowly changing you in ways that will ultimately reveal you.