Is your life a road trip or a commute?

What if the journey was actually the destination?

Hello fellow traveller,

I was at an event in London recently and got talking to a woman who was heading to Dorset the following weekend with her family. She was talking about the packing, the drive, the logistics of getting everyone ready and out the door. The focus was entirely on getting there.

And I thought: she's already on the road trip. She just can't see it yet.

The packing, the drive, the kids in the back. In ten years, that could be the main story. For all the right reasons. Not just the destination. Not just getting there.

Most of us treat our lives like a commute. Head down. Focused on arrival. Optimising the route. Wishing away the in-between so we can get to the part that matters.

The problem is that the in-between is the majority of it.

I realised something a few years ago that changed how I move through my days. The destination is such a tiny part of the whole. The journey is everything else. In fact the present moment is all we have.

The bus I didn't have to take

When I was CEO of The Conran Shop, I had a fifteen-minute cycle ride to work. Like living in a village. Beautiful route, down to the Thames at Tower Bridge, along Shad Thames. It was one of those things that looked perfect from the outside. Because it was.

I gave it up.

Not because anything was wrong with it. But because I realised I had no time to meditate, and I needed to find the time and somewhere to do it. So I started getting the bus instead. Forty-five minutes each way, adding half an hour to my commute, surrounded by school kids shouting and arguing and generally being chaotic.

It became one of my favourite parts of the day.

I'd sit there in the middle of all of it, doing a guided meditation, completely present, arriving at my office calm, grounded and with complete clarity. When I look back at that whole chapter of my life, the bus is one of the first things I go to. Funny that.

I turned the commute into the road trip. All I did was choose to be present in it.

Wonder-coloured glasses

At the breathwork retreat I went to recently, a woman said something that stopped me completely. She said, quite matter-of-factly: The world is bland.

It really struck me. I didn't know what to say for a moment.

Because life, to me, is the opposite of bland. It's full of wonder, curiosity, surprise, connection, beauty. Even the difficult parts. Especially the difficult parts.

And then I realised: she wasn't wrong about life. She was wrong about the lens.

If you're wearing bland-coloured glasses, everything will be bland. The Dorset drive will be a logistics problem. The bus will be a delay. The chaos will be noise.

Put on wonder-coloured glasses and the same journey looks completely different.

The question isn't whether your life is a road trip or a commute. The question is which lens you're wearing when you look at it.

Because the road is the same either way. It's the looking that changes everything.

Are you on a road trip or a commute right now?

Best,
Hugh

You've lived many versions of yourself in this lifetime. And there are many more still to come.

If you'd like to explore what it would take to make the whole thing feel more like a road trip, that's exactly the kind of conversation we'd have together. Let's talk.

P.S. Interesting how the bus journey helped underpin my life journey. Without it I would not have been where I am now.