There is no destination

Photo by Ricardo Alfaro on Unsplash. There is no true North, no destination, only the path.

Three months ago, I got married. Approximately nine years ago I became a heathen. These are two disparate events but I want to talk about what I see as a commonality between them: we may think of them as a destination or an endpoint but they are not. They are only the beginning of the journey.

It’s common in the over-culture to see marriage portrayed, especially for women in a relationship with a man, as the end of the story. The happily ever after. From our early childhood fairytales, books, and films show getting married as the happy ending, and it’s often seen by society as the great achievement or aspiration for a woman. These cultural narratives tell us that the “Big Day” with all the associated traditions and trimmings is the final hurdle and the culmination of a relationship, or even one’s life.

After we got home from our mini honeymoon, I went through a short period of feeling anxiety around “what now? what next?”. I have a tendency to be goal-oriented, and reaching a milestone or a goal leaves me with a sense of aimlessness until I have another to aim for. I had been focused on reaching the wedding, organising and planning everything for it, and once it was over there was a feeling of being adrift. Asking myself, “what is the next target?”

This desire to structure things around achieving a target has also cropped up in my religious and spiritual life. I have been pursuing or attempting to pursue paganism in some fashion since I was in primary school, specifically heathenry since I was about 20, and at various times I have felt the “what now? what next?” questions creeping up on me. I felt that there was some sort of end state or final accomplishment that I ought to reach, though I couldn’t identify what exactly that was.

As you might imagine, this was not very satisfying. As an inveterate maker of to-do lists, I felt that I was somehow failing at heathenry by not reaching this imagined end state and Finishing Heathenry. I care a lot about my religion and it made me anxious and unhappy to feel this way. It was also de-motivating, as I’m sure anyone familiar with the vicious cycle of shame-avoidance-shame will understand.

I actually had a breakthrough with both of these anxieties at the same time, which makes sense if you think about heathenry as a set of relationships with the Gods, Ancestors, and wights. My breakthrough was the following realisation: there is no one end state. There is no destination. There is only the journey.

The wedding day was not the final goal of my relationship with my husband. The final goal is to care for and cherish and love each other every day, for the rest of our lives. And in the same way, the final goal of my heathenry is to practice in a way that is fulfilling and meaningful for me and my Gods, Ancestors and wights, for the rest of my life.

The subtitle of this blog is “walking the winding path of modern polytheism”. I have conceptualised my practice as a winding path – weaving here and there as my life changes – for many years now. I think this is a case of the metaphor containing a deeper meaning than I knew when I came up with it. I do walk a winding path, and it is a path that has no end. No goal, no target to cross off a list, nothing for me to achieve.

Only the path, and how I walk it.