The Journey or the Destination?

At acting conservatory, I learned that part of the ethic of a Meisner-trained actor is not to work for a result. The idea is to leave yourself alone, and to let whatever is happening to you, happen. That each moment is enough, in and of itself, and doesn’t need to be measured against some final outcome. There is nothing to be ‘achieved’. We simply want to meet the moments as they come, and let it all unfold.

Fine. Yet, I find myself hard-wired to want something out of the deal. What’s the point of leaving myself alone and meeting the moments if, in the end, I can’t guarantee that I have done it right? And whether critics, internal and external, will think I am a good actor? My focus and my energy is finite, so I only want to apply it to efforts that will net me the biggest gain.

I have spent a lifetime packaging and quantifying my talent, my skills, my projects, my worth, my self. I wanted to be able to show it all to people and say “Look at everything I’ve done. Look at all I became. Isn’t it good?” I was focused on the end result and whether it was enough. It robbed me of a lot of enjoyment along the way.

Improvisation has helped me to understand that this thinking is flawed, and it showed me another way. It sounds cliché, ‘it’s the journey not the destination.’ But it is a fundamental shift in approach that can open pathways to more full experiences. Instead of straining to see something in the distance, fully engage with what is right in front of you. Set yourself on a path, and then allow each step to take you where it goes. Release control. (Or at least grip the wheel a little less tightly, to start.) Where it ultimately goes is merely how we retell it AFTER it has happened. It is exactly right, whatever it is, unless the only thing we allow ourselves to see is how far off we are from where we had planned to go.

As I move ahead, I choose to take the incremental moments and collect them without regard for what they will ultimately become. Rather than burden myself with obligation to achieve some unwieldy expectation of what a lifetime, or a decade, or a year, or a day, ought to be, I can experience it all more fully. And then leave the defining and the quantifying and the measuring for some future moment—a moment which I suspect may never come.

My journey is to know that I have already arrived where I need to be.