A Journey of One

The box was from my grandmother. It arrived on my doorstep, a worn cardboard cube held together with fraying twine. Inside, nested in tissue paper that smelled of lavender and old books, I found her journals. They weren’t diaries filled with daily events, but something else entirely. Each one was a map of a different desire she had chased throughout her long life.

One journal, bound in sun-faded blue linen, was filled with intricate drawings of constellations. The pages were a testament to her lifelong desire to understand the stars, a dream that had stayed with her from her childhood on a farm with a sky full of diamonds to her final days in a city apartment with a sky full of streetlights. Another, wrapped in soft, green leather, was a collection of recipes for plants and herbs—a cartography of her desire to heal, to mend, to nurture.

I realized then that we are all cartographers of our own desires. We spend our lives drawing maps of the things we want—a new job, a deeper connection, a moment of peace. We fill our minds with these intricate, beautiful plans, tracing the routes we believe will lead us to a better life. We obsess over the detours and the shortcuts, the mountain passes and the winding rivers.

But my grandmother’s journals held a different kind of wisdom. As I read through them, I saw that many of her maps were incomplete. The constellation charts had gaps, the recipes were missing ingredients, and the routes were often left unfinished. She hadn’t reached every destination. She hadn’t become a famous astronomer or a revered herbalist. Life, as it always does, had intervened.

At first, this struck me as a tragedy. What’s the point of a map you never use? But as I thought about it, I saw that the value wasn’t in the arrival, but in the journey of drawing the map itself. The desire to reach the stars had led her to countless nights spent on a cold field, watching the heavens. The desire to heal had led her to a quiet life tending her garden, to the smell of soil on her hands and the warmth of the sun on her back.

Her desires, even the unfulfilled ones, weren’t failures. They were the compass that had guided her through her life. The maps, incomplete as they were, had shown her where to look, how to feel, and who to be. The unreached destinations were not voids but beautiful, open possibilities that had shaped the person she became.

We are so often taught to measure our lives by what we accomplish, to judge our maps by whether we’ve reached the final destination. But what if the point is simply to have the desire? What if the joy lies in the act of drawing the map, in the hope and the yearning that fill our lives with purpose?

The greatest desires are not the ones we fulfill, but the ones that guide us. They are the constellations that hang in our personal sky, the compass that points us in the direction of our true selves. So go ahead. Draw a map of your wildest dreams. Don’t worry about whether you’ll ever get there. Just enjoy the view from wherever you are.

David E. Kiefermond