Reaching our best, or our perception of reaching of our best, comes harder than we might have supposed or I ever supposed. As Frankl says, always keep your expectation higher, as if you felt some cross wind as you fly toward your goal. When we don't keep our expectations high, the cross winds of life will shift us enough so that we may miss our goal or purpose. We have discussed that just now, so keeping our expectations of ourselves and others quite high and open really matters. On the other hand, truly reaching our best exceeds the idea of the goal as an end in itself. Robert Kane expresses an image and creates a resonant metaphor about realizing our best when he evokes the "quest of aspiration."[89]
The quest of aspiration places our desires beyond a specific goal that we know we can accomplish because others have done so. It acts out of our belief in our ability to reach and perhaps attain something beyond the limits of previous experience. Perhaps even something entirely unique to each of us. As our friend Kane writes, "It is something we seek without the assurances of attaining it." The becoming self and the quest of aspiration merge in their quality of being and becoming.
A rather typical metaphor for life is the journey. I have used it many times myself. The quest of aspiration presents a gloss on and shift in that idea. Journey definably takes us from one place to another. The journey takes us to a destination, a destination we know exists, and we know we reach: "the end of the journey." The quest of aspiration makes no such suggestion, makes no such promise. On such a quest, we seek that which we feel, that in which we believe, that which we will get to understand more fully as part of the quest itself. If the universe is unfolding, and our becoming self is unfolding, then our quest of aspiration also unfolds with an ever foliate quality, a flower that comes never ending into blossom and it remains in a never ending blooming. Metaphors aside, this seeming abstraction presents us with something tangible and meaningful.
In my life, I have heard many people talk about "going off to find myself." I reject making fun of people, especially when they want something truly of value quite sincerely. Still in a spirit of fun with language, it occurred to me that with all the self storage outlets in the country, wandering folks could find their self stored neatly away awaiting discovery and release. We might even walk. However, the point still remains. The self does not exist as a thing for us to encounter in some distant and unknown part of the world. Travel may do wonderful things for us in many ways, and through travel, we may experience helpful insights, but nothing can happen to us elsewhere if we couldn't find it here. What travel may do, thinking about it now, is face us with multiple critical moments, what we often call "culture shock," that introduces us to some meaning perspectives with which we have lived, and allows us access to the transformative process that best resolves the critical moment and the cognitive dissonance that it produces. However, even in a dominator/conformist environment, we can encounter critical moments where our meaning perspectives come into conflict with our direct experience of life. In those moments of cognitive dissonance, even if we travel little physically, we can recognize the value of critical reflection to resolve that moment and that dissonance, to take us out of limiting meaning perspectives and into the transformative, the unconditional, and liberation.
We can find such experiences in our desire to reach our best, to keep fulfilling our quest of aspiration. It may seem like a paradox. We can feel fulfilled in our becoming self and always seek an ever greater realization of that self.