In the Guardian Weekend magazine a while back, there was an article on analogies for life (life is a river, life is a box of chocolates, etc. etc.). Though it never mentions the phrase, the article is essentially about conceptual metaphor, the cognitive and linguistic device we use to give concrete form to abstract concepts like life, time, emotions, or pretty much anything else the world has to throw at us (a metaphor in itself).

Unsurprisingly, many people apparently view life as a journey. In fact, the concept of life being a journey is so entrenched in our (Western) psyche that it’s almost impossible to conceive of it in any other way. The prevailing notion is that you need to get somewhere in life, ideally by getting ahead (of other people, presumably), making it to the top (of the ladder? the mountain?), reaching your goals, arriving.

While metaphors like this enable us to think and talk about abstract things we would otherwise struggle to think or talk about, there is a danger in allowing a single, arbitrary metaphor to shape our view of ourselves, our lives and our place in this world. The “life is a journey” metaphor seems particularly apt, but it also seems particularly deleterious to me. It implies that we all need a specific destination (i.e., purpose) and that all of our efforts in life should go towards arriving at that destination.

For my part, I honestly don’t know if I’ve “gotten anywhere” in life. I mean, I’ve certainly gotten somewhere, but is it where I’m “supposed” to have gone, or did I “go astray” at some point? And who sets the course for a life anyway? What if your destination changes? What if you just like wandering around and exploring, with no particular destination in mind? If you never arrive anywhere, does that mean you’ve failed at life? The “life is a journey” metaphor would lead you to think so.

The Guardian article touches on other, less constrictive metaphors as well: life as a dance, as a play, or even as the act of playing music. Though the Alan Watts quote mentioned in the article (“When we make music we don’t do it in order to reach a certain point, such as the end of the composition”) was originally made in reference to meditation and not to life in general, I find the music analogy particularly resonant (metaphorically speaking).

Whether you’re in a band, or you’re jamming casually with other people, or you’re sitting all by yourself in your room, you play music for the sheer joy of it. You don’t play for a specific point in a song; you play for every point. You may love some parts of a piece of music and struggle through other parts, but you need all of the parts to make up the whole. You don’t bring everything to a screeching halt just because you’ve made a mistake; you keep going in the hopes that if that particular passage comes around again, you’ll do better next time (and if you do make the same mistake twice in a row, it’s not a mistake, it’s a variation). And when you reach the end, you don’t beat yourself up for having played this note instead of that one. You let it go and realize that there can be beauty even in cacophony.

It’s all terribly wishy-washy and self-helpy, I know, but as someone who often finds herself worrying about what I’m doing and where I’m going and how far I’ve come and where it’s all leading to, I think I would do well to ditch the journey metaphor once in a while and think of the music metaphor instead—not as an excuse for never accomplishing anything, but as a reminder that this moment in life is just as valuable as the next one and the one after that, and it’s better to pay more heed to the here and now than to fret constantly about what’s down the road…so to speak.