Being A Pilgrim

‘To journey without being changed is to be a nomad.

To change without journeying is to be a chameleon.

To journey and to be transformed

by the journey is to be a pilgrim.”

— Mark Nepo, The Book Of Awakening

I remember telling a therapist about a decade ago that I didn’t wish to end my life the way it was in 2008, I wanted to change. I wanted to be a different person. She stopped me and asked if I thought it was necessary to be a different person – she said I didn’t seem like such a bad one, but that I had lost perspective – why couldn’t I change and leave it at that?

It was a good and fair question; it got my attention — no drama, just hard work.

Almost every day, someone messages to tell me they have been following my story for some years, and they are happy to see that I am a different person now than I was a few years ago. “I can’t get over it,” said one book and blog reader from Montana last week, “you don’t seem like the same person I was reading just a few years ago.”

Aside from making me wince at people’s joy and relief in seeing my previous self vanish, I often think of the shrink’s caution.

I have come to understand that it is not possible to become a different person, even if I still wanted that to happen.

I’ve learned to love me as well as make me better, and when you learn to love yourself, you learn to love.

I hate to disappoint, but this is still the same old me. I can never be a different person, nor, I suspect, can anyone else. We are who we are at the core, genetically, emotionally, and culturally formed,  but that doesn’t mean we can’t be better or undertake a transformation.

I believe I have changed, and I think I have been transformed. I believe I am a pilgrim, a person who journeys to a special or sacred place for religious or spiritual reasons. My mission was to save myself; I came to the country with dogs.

Sometimes, feeling isolated and insecure, we change or hide what lives within in order to please or avoid others, or in order to ease our shame or pain or fear. I was an accomplished hider; the people closest to me had no idea what was raging inside of me.

The first person to see the real me was Maria, and I was stunned when she didn’t run for her life. The second was the strict therapist from New York, who practiced in Saratoga Springs. Her name is Peggy.

I don’t wish any longer to be a different person, just a better one. If I have changed at all, it is in the effort to be honest with myself and with others.  To be authentic.

Peggy said I had lost perspective. I’ve got some now.

That became the focus of my pilgrimage and my effort at the transformation. If I could be authentic, the rest would follow.

“Above all, don’t lie to yourself,” wrote Fyodor Dostoevsky in the Brothers Karamazov. “The man who lies to himself and listens to his lie comes to the point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and others. And having no respect, he ceases to love.”

Truer words…

That’s not a wrong description of me for much of my life in some ways.

Integrity is an unending process, wrote Nepo, of letting our inner experience and our outer experience complete each other, in spite of our very human lapses.

Those are important words for me, and I’ve read them many times.

Integrity is also an arduous process, especially when it involves transgressors like me. I might be more honest now, but I still sure make plenty of mistakes.

I understand these aspirations well, perhaps because I have violated them so often and so flagrantly. I consider myself a pilgrim now, not a chameleon or a nomad, although I have been both.

I am, I think, the same man, but a pilgrim in the deepest sense of the term, journeying well beyond my sense of self and any label or creed or tradition or faith. I will always have to work at it.

I live in a different space now, a compelling and recurring space in which I understand the moment and how it changes and transforms me.

The eye sees what it sees; the heart loves what it loves and is what it feels. There is a lot of integrity in that, a living moral compass.

To me, this has been the transformation, and most of the time, I am true to it. I don’t know if any human being can get to 100 percent, even the Dalai Lama says no, that is not possible.

As I get older, which I do not lament or mourn, I understand better the urgency of time – the moment shows me that what is real is sacred, and there is less interest in me in the past and the future.

This may be yet another gift of aging. I have too much of a past to linger over it, too many mistakes to apologize for or correct, and too small a future to worry too much about it.

I’m swimming in the now.

The young have no such luxury; staying in the moment is so much more complicated for them.