The Path

Legend has it that when the god Shiva lost his wife Sati in the fire, he became so distressed that he began to walk around like a beggar. Half-naked and covered in ashes, he often stood outside the temples dedicated to him. People would rush in to worship the god, but they did not recognize the real Shiva who sat like a beggar outside. They despised him, trampled on him, pushed him to enter the temple and praise him.

So it is with life... Sometimes happiness is before us and we look for it in temples. Everyone has their own temples... travel, business successes, outings... We endure the day or life as if it were a tepid journey, with the sole purpose of the destination because happiness is always waiting there.

As Alan Watts says...

You wake up one day in your 40s, realizing that you've achieved what you had in mind, but you don't feel much different from what you've always felt. And you get frustrated because you realize that there has been a terrible hoax: from a young age we were made to expect, and as a result we lost everything! Because we saw our life by analogy with the journey, the pilgrimage, which in the end had a specific purpose, and the important thing was to reach that purpose. But we missed the point all along the way: Life, is best understood by analogy with music... The listener enjoys the whole piece, without waiting for the final note. So all we too had to do in life was to dance and sing while the music was playing.

Perhaps one of the most magical realizations in yoga occurs the moment we "conquer" the "final posture" and nothing particularly unreal happens. How fruitful this futility is. So we stop perceiving the journey as something with a destination in mind, knowing that there is not necessarily a gift there, but rather the promise of yet another destination. We set aside Ithaca and begin very naturally to look for the beauty and small joys in what lies ahead. Ultimately, there is no road to happiness... happiness is the road.