It’s a little phrase that is a mantra of family travel experiences. Whether by car, train, plane or on foot, there is always a little voice from the back asking this question. Unknowingly the voice is questioning something far, far greater than simply the whereabouts of the end of that particular journey. Life is all about getting there one way or the other and we continually strive to find out where ‘there’ is, what we have to do to get there, what we are going to find there, and how we will know when we’ve got there.
At every turn, at every life changing decision and goodness knows every decision we ever make changes our lives in one way or another, we pause, sometimes unwittingly, sometimes deep in thought, and wonder if this is a real turning point in our lives, if this decision is the one that will bring us to the final plateau, the final destination, the place we have been travelling towards all these years. So we ask ourselves “Are we there?” Or more to the point “Are we nearly there?” Or has the journey of our life just turned full circle and we are actually practically back where we started.
The truth of the matter is that most of us don’t have a clue what is the object of our life, what is our final destination, apart from the proverbial hole in the ground, and how on earth we will know when we have reached there. And when we do think we have reached there, will there be a sign telling us that we are really there, or will it be some rather vague indication that we are in fact, nearly there, nearly being such an imprecise adjective as to have no really useful meaning.
And then there is the matter of that little word ‘we’. Does it mean ‘me’, or more grammatically correct ‘I’? Does the use of ‘we’ imply an unconscious knowledge that everyone else is also making this journey along with us, and everyone can be expected to arrive there together? Or is ‘we’ a reference to ‘me’ and a special someone else, someone for whom the journey has also been long, meandering and seemingly pointless?
Let us therefore insert a note of optimism into this wandering wondering. There comes a time in everyone’s life when it becomes possible to believe that the journey does have a conclusion, that the ‘we’ is indeed the coming together of two lonely people, the time when two soul mates find each other in the amorphous crowd that is humanity. Let us wander no more, let us wonder at the beauty of that meeting and enjoy a little story about two such lucky people.