Day four of our class trip to Athens. We were given a free day. Do as you wish. I packed what I needed: my phone, a portable charger, my wallet, and a pack of smokes (for social purposes). Then I took the 45-minute train to the city center and started moving.
I spent the morning being a tourist. Shopping, wandering, the usual. That afternoon I met a friend for coffee with a view of the Acropolis, where we spent an hour debating metaphysics and heresy (we would have made the Greek philosophers proud). Then she left, and I had 90 minutes alone in Athens. My portable charger was dead. My phone was at 20% and I still needed maps to get home.
So I turned the phone off and decided to get voluntarily lost.
No destination. No plan. Just: wander the city, ask strangers, and find something I didn’t know I was looking for.
Some time passed and I ended up in an urban district. Graffiti on every wall. Coffee shops built into apartment buildings. Bars tucked below street level. A young person’s dream. On the edge of the district I could see a park with a hill, and I wanted to get to the top of it.
I found an entrance and started climbing. Forty-five minutes of trails, wrong turns, and pictures taken. And then I made it.
The top of the hill had a crowd. Couples on dates, people reading, others sitting in the view: the Athens skyline, the Acropolis, the ocean, all at once. I found a spot and sat down. My feet dangled off a ledge. The seat was jagged rock. Just overhead of me someone had claimed a smooth flat stone, worn soft from years of people sitting on it. The kind of spot that earns its shape over time.
I noticed two things.
The first: I wanted that rock. Mine was sharp and awkward. That one looked like a chair.
The second: behind me, a couple was watching me. Eyeing my ledge. Hoping I would leave before the sunset so they could take it.
Nobody was content. I was coveting upward. They were coveting downward. And somewhere on the main road below us was a path that would have gotten me here in five minutes. I had spent 45.
That is when I started thinking.
The 45-minute route was not optimal. But it was mine. I found the urban district by wandering into it. I discovered the park because I had no plan and therefore no reason to pass it up. By the time I reached the top I was already fulfilled. Not because of the view. Because of the route that led to it.
Aristotle made a distinction between two kinds of activity. A kinesis is motion toward an end, incomplete until you arrive. Building a house is a kinesis. Walking to a destination is a kinesis. An energeia is an activity complete in itself at every moment. Seeing is energeia. Flourishing is energeia.
Most of us try to live like our lives are a kinesis. We want to get somewhere. The getting there feels like the point. But what I found on that hill is that the best arrivals are energeia in disguise. Complete at every step. The destination gives them direction. The journey gives them substance.
The couple behind me was not wrong to want the ledge. Longing for something better is not the problem. The problem is when the longing turns into blindness to what you already have. My spot was imperfect. It was also the exact spot someone else wanted. Both things were true. The view I had was real. The desire for a better one was also real. The question is which one you let drive the experience.
I see the same thing in how I play video games. Stay up all night to finish the main story and the credits roll and you feel empty. All the side quests you skipped are still sitting there with no reason to go back. But play it differently — do the side quests as they come, seek them out even, let the main story wait. When the credits roll that way, you feel like you lived in the world. Not just passed through it.
The destination has to exist. You need somewhere to go. But the destination is not the point. It is the thing that orients you, that keeps you moving, that gives the wandering a shape. Without it, 45 minutes on a hill is just being lost. With it, being lost is part of the journey.
A balance of longing and contentment. The longing gets you moving. The contentment lets you actually be where you are.