Journey of Life
By Marvin Payne

I’m a destination freak. Just gotta get there. I don’t remember a hike when I didn’t “get there.” Often I’ve left the folks I’m hiking with when time or strength was running out, just so I could be the one who “got there.”

Destinations are just fine, but here’s the rub: Very little of our time is spent there. At destinations, I mean. If we’re living in the present (our only real option) we have to notice sooner or later that in any given “present” we are probably on our way somewhere, on a journey.

The model is climbing Mount Timpanogos. It has taken me, at best, three hours to get up there — at worst, five — and about that long to get back down. But I’ve never stayed on top for as long as thirty minutes. (The longer you stay, the colder you get.) Usually I just eat the ding-dongs I’ve earned and start stumbling down again.

“Present” is good. I’ve written about this. About two weeks ago, actually.

24 February 2008 (about two weeks ago)

[These are destinations, but]

Continuing with the more relevant portion of the journal entry:

(Even thanks about something that happened a long time ago is about the present, because the gratitude is now. ((We never say, “I was grateful back then for that one blessing. I thanked you very much.)) A “harmonic” to this idea is the fact that good works, which slip immediately into the past and can be ((maybe should be)) forgotten, make you the person that you are, which ((Should I say who?)) is in the present.

Today, the personal value of all the things you’ve ever done is in who you are. Do you really want to present to the Lord at Judgment the breakfast you cooked for your wife when she was ill in the late nineties? Yuck! No, you want to present to the Lord at Judgment the kind of guy who cooks breakfast for his wife. It can’t be the length of the list that brings us within the grasp of Grace — the guys who worked all day in the parapbleand the guys who joined up in the eleventh hour each made a penny. ((I have worked in parables, and it’s hard work.)) What they did differs, but what they were ((the kind of guys who show up when they’re called) didn’t.

My daughter and son in primary, who never knew that great dabbler in the craft of lyric alteration, Spencer W. Kimball, like to sing “I Am a Child of God” ending the first verse with “Teach me all that I must know,” the second with “Teach me all that I must do” ((the Kimball edit)) and the final verse with “Teach me all that I must be.” I think they get it.)

If we’re focused on the journey, we make something beautiful of it. Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither has it entered into the heart of man the things we miss while limiting ourselves to the Interstate Highway System. It’s a system fearfully and wonderfully made for the use of long-haul eighteen-wheelers and, if Dwight D. Eisenhower is to be credited, tanks.

Interstates typically lead only to where people have done the most damage. If you and I can’t drive together along the back roads to Potsdam, New York, to Polk, Pennsylvania, to Torrey, Utah, and to Cokeville, Wyoming, let’s at least rent “Cars” and reserve a theater someplace. (If the editors of Meridian Magazine are right when they tell me how many people ((animals, aliens, cyber-’bots, the dead)) are reading this, we’d have to reserve the Conference Center in Salt Lake, with direct feeds into all the stake centers and NFL stadiums ((stadia?)) for our time together with the good people of Pixar, who speak the words “Route 66” with reverence.)

I’ll admit that the Interstate System has its uses. Once, driving I-84 alone between Tremonton and Boise, I read most of Respect For Acting, a useful book I, twenty-five years later, sometimes agree with. Once, driving the other way on the same stretch, I consumed a goodly portion of My Name Is Asher Lev. I took short breaks of looking up whenever the snow got deep.

I DON’T DO THIS ANYMORE.

Now with food we pretty much seem to understand this journey-to-destination emphasis ratio. We seldom think of dinner as “the Interstate to Health.” I have a friend who lost his sense of taste. He would stop his wife from dumping scorched peas down the disposal — it was all the same to him. Now this particular guy might be excused for looking at a pile of peas as simply little round carriers of certain nutrients, but not we. Nutrient absorption is, technically, the destination here, but to facilitate the journey past the teeth and around the tongue for a couple of laps is what we gather at the table for.

None of my journal entries actually has a name, beyond something like “2 October 1979.” This next one is the only exception. It’s called “Phoenix Phoeasco.”

2 October 1979

(At this point in her review of this column, my wife pointed out that this foregoing story seems really to be a lot more about destination than journey. Because there was very little in it of savoring the scenery and smelling the roadside roses, she’s probably right. But do I remember the destination? Not a bit, except that there were many Young Adults there, and among them a society of ageing returned missionaries who called themselves ((this word should so-o-o be “theirselves”)) “The Menace to Society Society.” I don’t even remember how my son entertained himself ((this word should so-o-o be “hisself.” Where is Spencer W. Kimball when you really need him?)) while I was sleeping until noon.

I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Sam grew up thinking all my gig trips were like the Phoenix Phoeasco. I know he was with me on several of those trips, but the one that springs to mind right now, a journey to be savored, is the one where the headlights failed on the way home from someplace south and east and far from here. Lonely mountain roads — no cops. There was a moon, which helped. Apart from that, the trick was to get behind somebody whose lights worked and follow them just close enough that they didn’t know we were there. (There is a metaphorical lesson here that we will save for another column, except to say that it will have to do with Doctrine and Covenants 46: 13-14.)

The journey is often where the excitement and beauty and growth are, whether we choose to put all that stuff there or are simply surprised, threatened, or astounded by it. And so, as the legendary Joan of Arc once said (and was subsequently quoted promiscuously, and usually without attribution, by Charles de Gaulle, Chief Inspector Jaques Clouseau, and Maurice Chevalier,

“Bon Voyage!”