The Myth of Arrival: Stop Chasing the Ending — Beneath The Surface
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On this episode of Beneath the Surface, we're going to unravel the illusion of arrival. That belief that one day you're finally going to get there and everything will be okay. But what if there is no there? No final moment when the chaos ends, the stress fades, and you finally feel enough. We explore why chasing the horizon only leaves us empty and how the true path forward begins when you stop running from now.

Welcome to Beneath the Surface. I'm Sean Delaney. This series is a space where I bring you the ideas I'm sitting with most, the ones I can't let go of, the ones I return to again and again in my own life, and the ones that show up constantly in the conversations behind closed doors with high performers, creatives, leaders, and people who are on the path like you, not just to do more, but to feel more alive while doing it. These episodes aren't about giving you another strategy or chasing another version of success.

They're about going a level deeper, getting quiet enough to hear what's underneath the noise, and remembering what actually matters. So if you're looking for a place to slow down, think deeply, and reconnect to the part of you that most of the world forgets to speak to, you're in the right place. Let's begin. Let's go beneath the surface.

We seem to be living under this illusion that there's going to be some point in future, some place in time, some moment where we feel like we finally have arrived, where we finally feel like enough, where the stress, the tension, the fear, the anxiety, the worry, all of that subsides. Where finally we've reached retirement on the beach, you know, the kind that feels like that permanent deep breath. But we all deep down know this isn't true.

There is no arrival. There is no moment in time, some place we reach where everything, all the stress, all the fear, all dissolves. This is an illusion. But we live so much of our life in this illusion. We look to the external, to all the people on the outside, looking at them like, look, they've made it, they've arrived, their life is easy, they have this, they have that. They don't feel all the pain, all the frustration. And so we live our lives in this comparative state. But we have to remember,

No one ever reaches this final destination, this arrival, this place we get to where fear won't lurk, where there won't be problems, where stress won't arise, where in the middle of the night we won't wake up at that bad phone call. Because the arrival point doesn't exist. And deep down, you know this, but you continue to climb, hoping that you can reach that next mountaintop that gives you that feeling of enoughness.

But you need to know there will never be that point, a point where there's no mystery or ambiguity, where your heart can't break. There won't be a time where a loved one won't show up at the wrong intersection when someone else runs the red light or when that unknown diagnosis hits us. But by living in this false belief, this expectation of an arrival, by constantly chasing after something outside of ourselves, we let life pass us by. Stop and think about that.

By chasing something outside of ourselves, we let life pass us by. So what are you missing in this chapter of your life because you believe a better chapter is coming? What are you waiting to happen before you finally allow yourself to feel peace? What's the cost of postponing your presence for a future that may never come? This is what we're diving into on this episode.

And I'm hoping by diving deeper into this, we won't let life pass us by. We won't miss now for some expectation of then. This episode, though, like all of them, is not about giving you answers. It's about bringing this concept to the forefront of your awareness because what we make aware in our lives, we have the ability to change, to respond to, to act in alignment with who we want to become. It's what Osho meant when he said awareness is the greatest thing.

Alchemy there is. Awareness is the greatest alchemy there is. And for me, so much of change in my own life is just by bringing awareness. It's what allows me to see where I'm tripping over my feet. It's what allows me to see where I'm living in an illusion and how to see with more clarity. So I want your awareness to be heightened that we spend so much time thinking about getting there that we spend so little time being here.

There is no arrival. There is only now. And the more you evade the present moment in hopes of a greater future, the more you become a passenger in your own life. This is what Robert Persig wrote about in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. He said, to live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here's where things grow. What is the point of getting to the top of the mountain if we despised the entire journey?

Persig also said, the only Zen you'll find at the top of the mountain is the Zen you bring to the mountain. Let that one land for a moment. The only Zen you'll find at the top of the mountain is the Zen you bring to the mountain. So are you bringing a peaceful Zen mind to what you're doing or just doing it in hopes you'll get a Zen calm mind at the end of it?

Pause and think about that. Are you missing this chapter of your kid's life because they're in diapers and it's chaotic and messy and you're just looking forward to when it's finally done and everything's clean? You know, are you thinking about some point in the future with work where you'll finally allow yourself to feel joy or complete or enough? The more often we put the idea of peace outside of us in a time or an event or a person, we actually rob ourselves the ability to embody it now.

And one of my all-time favorite clips about this was from Hollywood great Matt Damon. This was a few years ago. He was on the Graham Norton Show, and he was asked about winning the Oscar at the age of 27. Just think about this. Winning the Oscar, the absolute peak for an actor. And he does this at the young age of 27. You know, your wildest dreams have all come true. The prestige...

And this is what Damon ends up actually saying about it. I remember very clearly looking at that award and thinking very, very clearly. Am I allowed to say a four-letter word on this show? I literally looked at it. I was alone with it. And I said to myself, thank God I didn't fuck anybody over for this. And I suddenly had this kind of thing wash over me where I thought, imagine chasing that

and not getting it and getting it finally in your 80s or your 90s with all of life behind you and realizing what an unbelievable waste of your, you know what I mean? Because it can't, it's gotta be, you know what I mean? It's not, it can't be, it can't fill you up. It will never, if that's a hole that you have, that won't fill it, right? And I felt so like blessed to have that experience

awareness. To learn it. To learn it. And because I wouldn't have known it unless I knew it. I just love that clip. Think about when we had this belief that some external thing is going to make us feel whole or complete, like enough, like we've arrived. But what happens when we get there with that expectation is the pattern repeats. We reach one mountain and then we look over and we see there's another mountain.

That's why it can't be enough. This is what Damon was trying to describe. You need to bring that Zen. You need to enjoy the moment. You need to enjoy the process. If you're living in this continual tension state of when I finally do, when I finally reach, then I will allow myself to be, you're going to get there and have some extreme dissatisfaction. Makes me think of this little piece Morgan Housel wrote.

about the astronauts walking on the moon. And he wrote, astronaut Al Bean walked on the moon during Apollo 12. He turned to astronaut Pete Conrad and said, it's kind of like the song, Is That All There Is? And he said Conrad was relieved because he secretly felt the same. Think about that. If they didn't arrive when walking on the moon or winning an Oscar, do we believe we will get that feeling when we finally receive that title or get that house or that number in the bank account or fill in whatever thing it is for you?

This is one of the most dangerous traps we fall into. It's the thought that when I get, then I will be. When I get that job, then I will be happy. When I get that number in the bank account, then I will be successful and fulfilled. Whatever it is for you, it's that feeling that when I get blank, then I will be blank. So we fall into this trap and we face these continual patterns that I didn't get what I wanted, so now I'm stressed and unhappy.

Or I got what I wanted, but it didn't bring me the lasting happiness I expected. You know, I achieved my goal, but then why'd the satisfaction fade so quickly, leaving me right back where I started chasing the next thing? Or I achieved the goal, you know, I won the championship, but I'm so afraid of losing it. What about next year? If we never arrive, what do we focus on though?

And like I said in the beginning, it's not about giving you answers. I'm just going to share a few things that have been helpful for me when I feel that state of tension around, I want to arrive. I want that moment in time. I want that place to finally be here now. So I begin with, who are you committed to being no matter what situation or circumstances you face in your own life? Think about that. Who are you committed to being no matter what situation or circumstances you face in your own life?

The way I do this with my client during our yearly reviews is I have them write a one-page document describing in vivid detail who they're committed being the next year. And I believe this is a critical exercise because it opens up your eyes and your imagination to who you can be right now in this moment. It's not about what you're doing, but who you're being. And what you want to think about is what's not going to change about you when everything's changing? Who are you going to be? How are you going to show when all the things around you are changing?

What are you going to stay true to? Think deeply on who you're committed to being. That state of being that is going to ground and anchor you, like I said, when everything's swerving. One of the exercises I love for my friend, orchestra conductor Benjamin Zander, he writes about this, but he says he gives all of his students in the orchestra

An A. He wants them to have an A, which is a possibility to live into. He says, I want you to fall passionately in love with who you are and who you are becoming. So when you're thinking about who you're committed to being, don't sell yourself short. Think about giving yourself an A in that class. This is who I'm going to be. This is who I can be. And I can embody these actions right now.

And for my own life, the way I think about this is what are my highest possibilities and potentialities? And what I do is I sit down and I write down the key roles. And I don't like that title or that word. But I think about the roles I play in my own life. Father, husband, son, a coach, a friend. And I think about these roles.

And then I think deeply about who I'm committed to being in each one of those. So when you're thinking about your highest expression and your potentiality of the big buckets in your life, what are the infinite games you're playing there? And the way I think about this, like I just said a second ago, is which are those inner potentialities that I want to dedicate my life cultivating, developing, and expressing in the world? Think about that. What are the inner potentialities that you want to dedicate your life cultivating, developing,

and expressing in the world. So like I mentioned those roles, father, husband, coach, all of those roles, what are the potentialities I'm committed to and I'm going to cultivate and develop and then express? And so for me, a few of them are seeking wisdom. Seeking wisdom never ends. It's an infinite game. You never reach the end of wisdom. So I can play that game my entire life.

Another is presence. Can I be present both for myself and others and also be here in the present moment? There is no end destination to that. I can train that wherever I am in every single moment of my life and it will never end. The same with passion and kindness. There is no end. It's what James Kars wrote about in his book Finite and Infinite Games. He said a finite game is played for the purpose of winning an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.

And I also had one of the last public conversations before James died on this podcast. It's episode 182, and I highly recommend it. So I want you thinking about what are the infinite games you're playing in life, the ones you want to continue, the ones that you want to perpetuate, the ones that never end. So these types of infinite games are what garner my attention. So when I find myself thinking about some arrival place, I bring myself back to the present moment and think about these games.

How do I find wisdom in this moment? How do I be more present? How do I show up with more passion and more kindness? And so I can perpetuate these games forever. I'm not focused about winning or losing, but being. It's less about a destination, and for me, it's so much more direction. Who I'm committed to being in each one of those roles has no end destination.

But in order to live truthfully into those, I need to be playing my own game. I need to think deeply about who I'm committed to being. I need to be living my life by an inner scorecard, not the outer scorecard. This is what the great philosopher Wu Xin said. He said, there is no forest, there is no cave, there is no mountaintop where one can hide from oneself. So you need to begin with yourself, your truth, and develop these. Who are you committed to being in this life?

I know, per usual, these episodes, I seem to be throwing a ton at you. This is intentional. And the reason this is intentional is I never gravitate towards teachers or mentors who just deliver that one neatly polished idea on a silver platter.

The people that I'm drawn to, that I've learned the most from, were freaking shooting their lessons out of a fucking fire hose to me. Where I feel like I'm drowning and I'm so overwhelmed by the amount they're putting on my plate. But there's also this state where I'm actually more inspired and invigorated even though I can barely keep up. That's who I'm drawn to. That's what I'm drawn to. And that's why I'm delivering this. So if it feels like you're drinking out of a fire hose on this episode, it's okay.

You want podcasts and books and peoples that you have to listen to again and again and revise your thinking and come back to it again and again. So I just wanted to tell you that because if it feels somewhat overwhelming, it's intentional. Now, another thing I focus on is finding mountains, mountains that call to me. What are those things that you truly love doing and want to continue?

Dr. George Sheen and one of my favorite books, Running and Being, wrote this, and this is one of my favorite quotes of all time. He said, if you are doing something you would do for nothing, then you are on your way to salvation. And if you could drop it in a minute and forget the outcome, you are even further along. And if while doing it, you are transported into another existence, there is no need for you to worry about the future. Think about that. What are the activities that when you're doing it, you're transported into another existence?

That's what I'm focused on. Those types of mountains that I lose myself when I'm climbing. It makes me also think about the book Mastery written by George Leonard. And he wrote this, he says, for a master, the rewards gained along the way are fine, but they are not the main reason for the journey.

Ultimately, the master and the master's path are one. If the traveler is fortunate, that is, if the path is complex and profound enough, the destination is two miles farther away for every mile he or she travels. The destination is two miles farther away for every mile he or she travels.

What he means by this is you are so passionately in love with the journey you're on, with what you're doing and who you're being in the process, that you savor it, that you actually hope it gets further away with each step you take. You want the destination to get further away because you love the process. Unfortunately, though, so few people ever trust themselves to follow those types of journeys. I bring that quote up again and again by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. When you trust yourself,

you will know how to live. Trusting yourself is about tuning inwards to these type of mountains you want to climb. And speaking of mountains, it makes me think of the great mountaineer George Mowry. And people asked him, they said, what is the use of climbing Mount Everest? George Mowry was a great mountaineer who climbed Everest multiple times.

And he says, my answer must be, it is no use. There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. He says, we may learn a little about the behavior of the mountain or the body at high altitudes, but otherwise, nothing, nothing will come of climbing Mount Everest. He says, it's no use.

So if you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won't see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. What Maori is describing to me is not about what the ego wants, but what the soul wants.

In order to know what the soul wants, you need to be able to slow down, to find some stillness, silence, and solitude so you can listen to your deeper desires. Now, what else do we need on this journey? Well, we're going to need patience.

Because in our continual pursuit to become, we have to remember not to be consumed with the act of becoming, that we neglect the sacred art of being. It's this delicate balance between becoming and being. That is the dance of existence. It's easy to become lost in the future about the person we yearn to be, that we forget to inhabit the person we are here and now.

makes me think of one of my favorite passages by the poet Rilke in his letters to a young poet. He wrote, "'Being an artist means not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree which doesn't force its sap and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterwards summer may not come. It does come, but it comes only to those who are patient. I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for. Patience is everything.'

Anytime I find myself rushing in life, I come back to this passage by Rilke. Makes me also think about what the Dr. Gordon Littlesting wrote when he said, only bad things happen quickly. Virtually all happiness-producing processes in our lives take time, usually a long time. Learning new things, changing old behaviors, building satisfying relationships, raising children. This is why patience and determination are among life's primary virtues.

patience, patience on this journey. If we continually think about reaching some end and destination, then we don't have patience. We need patience on this path. And like I was saying a few minutes ago, I don't want to give you answers because we all need to find our own answers and ways of being. We need to know what connects with us and what patience feels like. Rilke also wrote this incredibly deep and important passage. He said,

I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything, live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

I think we all had this expectation when we're younger that we look to adults and it seems like they've had it all figured out. We just think if we read enough or learn enough or live long enough that we will figure it out. But that is so wrong. Life only gets more ambiguous. The more you know, the less we know. Life is just a perplexing situation and there are no clean answers. It makes me think of the Bengali poet.

Ah, Tagore, and he has one of my favorite quotes of all time. He was also a polymath. He said, the small wisdom is like water in a glass, clear, transparent, pure. The great wisdom is like the water in the sea, dark, mysterious, impenetrable.

The small wisdom, the easy answers we seek and get early in life, they're not the real wisdom. The real wisdom is dark and mysterious. There is serious ambiguity in our lives. It takes a lot of walking down a long road before you can start to understand our lives are endless seas of ambiguity and mystery. And one of the signs of a truly evolved human being is the ability to live in ambiguity.

The ability to embrace ambiguity is part of what opens us up to enlargement and meaning and purpose. So you want to develop the capacities and ability to hold ambiguity and mystery and conflicting elements of your life together. To know that pain comes because you previously had joy. To know the dark and the life, the oscillatory patterns of life and know there's no escaping this life without the pain.

When I think about my own life and the periods that I grew the most, where I had the greatest insights or accomplishments, they all came after wrestling with challenges or by confusion or unknown, not having clarity. It's almost as this process of not knowing or feeling stress or tension is a necessary ingredient in life.

It's even interesting that we came from the dark, right? We were born from the dark. And so you only uncover the light, the answers through the darkness. And I don't think when I was younger, my ego could have handled this. When I was younger, I felt I needed to know all the answers to control. But as you get older and you experience more, you realize how little you control. And so what you just start to do is you shed the ego and you start to open up to the mystery, to this natural unfolding process to not know.

And like I was talking about before, some of those potentialities and capacities I want to develop is how do I live in the unknown? How do I live in mystery? As Heraclitus said, all is flux. Everything is changing. And so we need to learn and spend time embracing the mystery. So stop living in the illusion that life won't break you, that pain won't find you, that suffering won't happen.

Carl Jung said this really profound line. He said, so much unnecessary suffering comes into the world because people will not accept the legitimate suffering that comes from being human. Think about that. The legitimate suffering that comes from being human. You know, that pain of aging, the pain of losing a loved one, everything we've talked about. And the Greeks used to say, you suffer your way to wisdom. Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart, said Dostoevsky.

But because we want the quick fix, we don't want to wait. We want to finally arrive. We have such a hard time living in tension and suffering. But what do we do instead? We distract. You know, our culture's answer to the existential anxiety of being human is distraction. We just continue to scroll. We click. We numb. We do anything to face the necessary and legitimate suffering that comes from being human. We will do anything.

to distract ourselves from pain and frustration. But because of that, we sleepwalk our way through life. And that is the worst suffering. That is what young men, that so much unnecessary suffering comes into the world because people will not accept the legitimate suffering that comes from being human. You have to remember that some things are going to break your heart, but man, they're going to fix your vision.

Breaking of the heart has to happen and will happen. There's no escaping this life without that. Our medicine so often comes in these really strange ways and moments that look terrible and painful, they only make sense looking backwards. It's what I was talking about a few minutes ago. I said my greatest memories and lessons and moments I'm proud of came on the other side of pain. I had to be broken open for those things to take place.

Makes me think of this great line by Hermann Hesse. He said, I begin to understand that suffering and disappointments and melancholy are there not to vex us or cheapen us or deprive us of our dignity, but to mature and transfigure us. So don't waste your suffering. Don't waste your pain. Let it ripen you. Let it transfigure you. This is what David White, the poet, wrote when he said the soul will have no rainbow if the eyes had no tears.

So we're coming to a conclusion here. And where have we ended up? It seems like we ended up exactly where we started with no answers, only more questions. But my hope, my hope is that we stop chasing after these mirages and start allocating our beautiful and precious energy towards the dance we're in the middle of right freaking now. Imagine, imagine if you stopped thinking so much about the future and bring all of that energy and attention right now. So the next time you find yourself saying,

When I get blank, then I will be. Bring yourself back to the present moment and think, before I do, I arrive. Before I act, I am. Be here before you do here. By pushing off something into the distant future, which we can't control anyway, we actually rob ourselves of the ability to show up fully in the present moment. And in that presence, in that state of being, we have the ability to handle anything life is going to throw at us. So remember,

Bring yourself back to here, back to now, back to being. And I want to share as we're closing up a longer passage from Maria Popova that I feel so beautifully encapsulates so much of what we discussed. She wrote, "...in recent seasons of being, I have had occasion to reflect on the utterly improbable trajectory of my life plotted not by planning, but by living."

We long to be given the next step and the route to the horizon, allying our anxiety with the illusion of a destination somewhere beyond the vista of our present life. But the hardest reality to bear is that death is the only horizon, with numberless ways to get there, none replicable, all uncertain in their route, all only certain to arrive.

This is why there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives, and this is why each and every one of them, even the most seemingly actualized, trembles with a staggering degree of doubt and confusion. Uncertainty is the price of beauty and integrity, the only compass for the territory of uncertainty that constitutes the landmass of any given life.

And so the best we can do is walk step by intuitively right step until one day, pausing to catch our breath, we turn around and grasp at a path. If we have been lucky enough, if we have been willing enough to face the uncertainty, it is our own singular path, unplotted by our anxious younger selves, untrodden by anyone else. And finally, I will leave you

with this excerpt from Alan Watts, which I think nails so much of this. Music differs from, say, travel. When you travel, you are trying to get somewhere. In music, though, one doesn't make the end of a composition the point of the composition. If that were so, the best conductors would be those who played fastest, and there would be composers who wrote only finales.

People go to concert just to hear one crashing chord, because that's the end. Same way in dancing. You don't aim at a particular spot in the room. That's where you should arrive. The whole point of the dancing is the dance. Now, but we don't see that as something brought by our education into our everyday conduct. We've got a system of schooling which gives a completely different impression. It's all graded. And what we do is we put the child into the corridor,

of this grade system where they're kind of, "Come on, kitty, kitty, kitty." And now you go to kindergarten, you know? And that's a great thing because when you finish that, you'll get into first grade. And then come on, first grade leads to second grade and so on. And then you get out of grade school, you go to high school and it's revving up, the thing is coming. Then you're gonna go to college and by a joke, then you get into graduate school. And when you're through with graduate school, you go out to join the world. And then you get into some racket where you're selling insurance.

And they've got that quota to make. And you're going to make that. And all the time, the thing is coming. It's coming. It's coming. That great thing, the success you're working for. Then when you wake up one day about 40 years old, you say, my God, I've arrived. I'm there. And you don't feel very different from what you always felt. Look at the people who live to retire and put those savings away. And then when they're 65, they don't have any energy left. They're more or less impotent. And, uh,

They go and rob in an old people's senior citizens community. Because we've simply cheated ourselves the whole way down the line. We thought of life by analogy with a journey, with a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end. And the thing was to get to that end. Success or whatever it is, or maybe heaven after your death. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played. Enjoy the next breath.

I'll see you on the next one. If this episode resonated with you, if it stirred something, opened something up, or even challenged something, I'd love to hear about it. You can connect with me directly at whatgotyouthere.com. That's where you'll find my writing, my books, more about my executive coaching work I do with the people who want to live and lead from a deeper place. And if this episode made you think of someone, a friend, a teammate, a partner, someone who's been in the grind and might need to hear this, send it to them.

Because sometimes all it takes is a single conversation to shift the direction we're heading in. Again, it's whatgotyouthere.com. You can reach out, learn more, or just say hi. I always love hearing from people walking this path. Thanks for listening, and until next time.