"We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time."

—T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

The ego tends to experience the inner life as progress—moving from one place to a better one, accumulating insight, arriving somewhere more advanced than where we began. The image of arrival, in that framework, looks like departure. We have left the old life behind.

But Eliot suggests something quieter. The destination may turn out to be the beginning, seen differently. The ordinary life we were always living—the relationships, the mornings, the recurring difficulties—may not be what we were trying to escape. They may be where everything we were looking for was already waiting. Not unchanged, but newly visible.