Raidho Meditation

Journey, Experience, Facing the World

Like it or not, many of us are hobbits. We love stories, but deep down, we'd rather read about an adventure than go on one ourselves. Adventure means struggles and challenges - and what's worse, it means setting foot outside our front door.

Many of us build fortresses, with or without realizing it. We expect adversity to find us, so who in their right mind would go and seek it? Our comfort zones, our indulgences - even our procrastinations and addictions - were created for good reason, with the best of intentions, right? To numb some pain, or avoid feeling too overwhelmed, in and of itself, is sometimes a good thing. When taken too far or clutched for too long, however, it can also lead to stagnation, or even do us worse harm than whatever we were retreating from.

Sometimes we need to gather our courage to take that fateful step over the threshold. It may be that we were terrified over something, only to discover that we turn out to be more powerful than whatever we were afraid of. Other times, the problem or task at hand is as big as we imagined, but we can "level up" and grow in our ability to tackle it. Sometimes this occurs little by little, by breaking it down into smaller parts.

We can only be one place at a time, taking one step at a time. The important part is to take one step after another, and to keep going. Maybe the distance covered, or how long it takes, or what gets accomplished, will feel like either too much or not enough. Still, you will go further by being on the road than staying in your comfort zone.

And yes, the journey can change a person - in fact, it usually will. Just as Bilbo returned stronger, braver, and more powerful, with new friendships and tales of inner strength, your journeys can change you as well. Knowing that, when challenge knocks, you can meet it and defeat it, is well worth the effort. (And yes - you can go home to some sort of comfort zone again, changes and all. We all need rest from the road.) The hands on experience gained will teach you things about yourself which all the stories and books in the world cannot.

So often we are jealous of the adventures in books. In reality, this jealousy comes because we could be having adventures of our own, but have come to believe that we cannot, or that we would fail. Our unbeatable challenges seem so much more difficult than those in books - but if we were living the stories, unable to see how things would turn out, we would be just as overwhelmed. It is far easier to read of hobbits searching for the last crumbs of lembas bread, than to stretch only a few dollars into food for far too many days. It is far easier to read of a battle of riddles than to go on a job interview. Yet these are our stories, which we are living, and by banding together and forming a fellowship and claiming agency over our lives we can indeed make changes.