Journeys Without End

Life can be consumed as a series of packaged experiences, approached with a cool knowingness of genre: here's your holiday package, here's your home package, boxes checked - swimming pool, tennis court, ensuite bathrooms. Here's your action movie, which we've made very like other action movies, to satisfy your need to re-experience favourite memes, but to which we've added a subtle blending of memes from somewhat divergent genres, lightly to tickle your jaded palate. And we've been careful to avoid new ideas.


But life doesn't have to be packaged. When at the age of twelve I paid ten dollars for my first guitar, I knew that I was embarking on a journey without end. It was a way into music, a pursuit and passion not only of infinite extent but of infinite dimension. It was an instrument on which to hone physical skills for life; it was a portal into the minute examination of the disciplines of mind that allow intricate patterns to be imagined and expressed.

When I first realised where books could take me, I could see countless paths to distant horizons that could never be reached.

I remember the same passion for movies. The movies end but their stories reverberate. The telling never ends.

When in my late twenties I bought my first personal computer, it felt the same way. It was the first step down a track from which I could never return; from which I would never want to return. The ecstasy of infinite possibility.

In Buddhism Without Beliefs, Stephen Batchelor is talking about his version of the path to awakening, and it feels like one of those journeys. A voyage of discovery, a voyage of no return, away from the fences and fatigue of the familiar. The mind relaxes, enlivens, begins to think again. Old memories revive, old dreams and ideas. New experiences can be taken in. The voyage of the Beagle.