“Nobody can enjoy the experience he desires until he is ready for it. People seldom mean what they say. Anyone who says he is burning to do something other than he is doing or to be somewhere else than he is is lying to himself. To desire is not merely to wish. To desire is to become that which one essentially is.” — Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi

I was talking to my bride about an upcoming trip friends are taking to a place I’ve wanted to go. We’re going to a few remarkable places ourselves this year and we can’t do everything, right?Sure: we can’t do everything… I can’t argue that I often say I want to go to many places, but there are precious few that haunt me in my dreams.

To desire to see the world is common, but precious few actually seek out all of the places they want to go to. Those trips of a lifetime are called that because most people only take them once. It’s up to us to determine if that’s enough. My own time bucket for such travel is shockingly short, and so I feel I must go when the siren calls. We all know what those sirens were up to, don’t we? Calling us to the rocks. The only safe way out was to keep going.

The person we are now is the person we’re ready to be. Who we aspire to be means nothing more than the direction in which it sends us. We are here because we were once called here, and we willingly made the journey. Sometimes we arrive at a place we love, sometimes we find that it’s not what we wanted at all. Who we become next is up to us—but we must keep moving.

As James Clear said (and I’ve quoted countless times now): “Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.” Knowing this, we simply begin moving deliberately in the direction we wish to go in. Our habits are the incremental steps towards becoming. It begins with desire and is realized through consistent action. Simple, yet so hard to grasp sometimes. Routine hides in plain sight, after all.

The thing is, we seek so much more than to visit various places. It’s not the visit, it’s the transformation of the visitor. We are completing a puzzle who’s picture is our future self. But in this puzzle, we get to choose some of the pieces. And just when we look at ourselves in the mirror, the puzzle pieces get scrambled all over again. We can’t spend our lives wishing for tomorrow, but we can choose some of the pieces now that will make up who we’ll be then.