The greatest triumphs are the biggest trials overcome, and the biggest trials overcome involve those things battled at times for years. The very things we’ve often been most ashamed about, because they haven’t shifted, inevitably end up being our most prized achievements—because of the tenacity we had in not giving up.
In context of this article, let’s define ARRIVAL: it’s “the action or process of arriving.”
Emotionally or spiritually speaking, it’s transcending a thing: the acceptance of a loss, the healing of a core wound, a person to forgive who hasn’t repented, recovering from an addiction, etc.
One of the biggest challenges we all face is having not ‘arrived’ at a place of healing, acceptance, recovery, forgiveness, contentedness, etc. Just like it is for the stages of grief, we may seem to arrive for a time, until we slip off the wagon again into patterns of ‘non-arrival’.
Maybe you’ve been promising yourself for years not to be so ‘nice’ to those who never return your kindness. Maybe you’ve been promising them boundaries. But every time you initiate them you feel their wrath and you can’t be bothered with the fallout.
You’re trying, aren’t you? You haven’t arrived and that’s okay. Your best is good enough.
Maybe you’ve been working on yourself with varying levels of success all these years. You do well for a while and then a bevy of challenges assaults you, and then you’re back to square one.
You’re trying, aren’t you? You haven’t arrived and that’s okay. Your best is good enough.
Maybe it’s the loss you simply can’t accept—it still rips you apart at times. You face the pain well enough (you can’t not!). You battle the ongoing grief and the triggers.
You’re trying, aren’t you? You haven’t arrived and that’s okay. Your best is good enough.
Maybe you’ve sensed for a while that you’ve experienced a breakthrough, and just when you begin to get excited that the miracle has finally occurred, you backslide a little. You’re tempted to throw in the towel. You can’t bear for your hope to be crushed once more.
You’re trying, aren’t you? You haven’t arrived and that’s okay. Your best is good enough.
The spiritual journey is not about arrival, and the paradox is we need to accept this before we can genuinely contend with the possibility of arriving at a farther point along the journey.
What if ‘arrival’ is hardly the point, and that what we can learn is that grace is even more copious than we could ever dream.
What if the fact that we haven’t arrived, and that we observe how others haven’t arrived, is evidence in itself that grace would have us just accept that our will to do better is enough—that we’re rightly motivated.
What if there’s something to be learned in accepting ourselves in a state of pre-arrival?
What if we don’t need to ‘arrive’ to be accepted. Imagine being good enough as it is—as we are—not needing to change to be loved, appreciated, valued, accepted.
Again, the paradox is we need to arrive at non-arrival, accepting we never arrive, to journey farther along the way.
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