Most men believe there is a place in life to which one may arrive and then remain. They imagine a final position, a point of rest where nothing further is required.

This has never been so. There is no final position. There is no ground that remains fixed beneath a man’s feet.

Every end, once assumed and fulfilled, reveals more than the man first intended. Fulfillment does not close life; it expands it. And this expansion produces tension — not as punishment, not as failure, but as movement.

Neville Goddard

This quote comes from a clip that showed up in my YouTube algorithm.

The situation that Goddard describes is generally known as The Myth of Arrival.

The Myth of Arrival is the belief that fulfillment and completeness lies just beyond the horizon of the next goal: attaining a certain position in your career, a certain amount of money in the bank, a certain level of income, a certain size house, a spouse, a child, a certain group of friends.

This is the conceit behind almost all marketing: the promise that whatever the person is selling is the thing you need to feel complete. When you reach that level, you will have made it. You will have arrived.

Goddard presents several examples of the same pattern:

A person resolves some struggle to get to the place they had once imagined: a secure livelihood, establishing ourselves in career, attaining harmony in a relationship.

Once the person attains the goal, they have a moment of peace. Their anxiety dissipates. They bask in harmony and peace.

But then they start to feel a sense of unease. They feel unsettled. The person watches the hard-won peace, fearful it will evaporate. They revisit what has already been settled.

You thought you had arrived, but suddenly you worry it will all be taken away.

What’s happening?

3 Traps That Keep Us Chasing Arrival

Goddard alludes to three traps that keep us chasing arrival.

(1) Life Is Always Moving

Goddard explains that this disturbance occurs not because something has failed, but because life has exceeded the limits of the state we previously lived from.

This discomfort is not evidence of error. It is evidence of expansion.

The mind seeks rest. Life does not consent. Life advances by exceeding the places a man once lived from. Each fulfilled state reveals how limited the frame that contained it truly was. The state did not betray him. It completed its purpose. And life continued without asking permission.

The practicality is that we can’t see the full landscape from where we stand today. As we move through life, we get exposed to different perspectives. This exposure alters our ideas of what will fulfill us.

(2) We Identify With the Struggle

Goddard explain that the person who revisits established matters isn’t just wrestling with uncertainty. Instead, it’s that

the man who had lived by strain had no further office to occupy.

The person who revisits the what was previously settled does so

not because harmony failed, but because the self who had struggled has no place to stand.

When we struggle to attain our goals, we build our identity around being the person who overcomes obstacles, strives, or who hasn’t yet made it. When “complete” is always around the corner, we learn to identify as incomplete.

When we actually arrive at a landing place, that version of ourselves has no role to play.

(3) We Misunderstand the Nature of Fulfillment

This is why no attainment ever brings final ease. He who seeks stability has misunderstood fulfillment.

Fulfillment is not an end. It is a demand, a summons to a greater occupancy of life. When this is not understood, a man imagines he has failed. He decides something is out of order. He grows uneasy. He looks backward, but the former place can no longer contain him. Life has already passed beyond it and will not remain confined to what the man once called sufficient.

Embrace the Forward Movement of Life

At the moments when we’re on the precipice of a major change, we often feel a discomfort that causes us to revisit the past. In the rearview mirror, our “mistakes,” mis-steps, and mishaps are magnified, and we might feel the impulse to return to correct them.

But that’s the wrong impulse.

Life doesn’t go backward; it only moves forward.

The moments when we feel compelled to revisit what had already been settled in the past, are in fact the moments to lean into the future.

There is no stable place. There is only movement from one standing to another. And every movement asks but one surrender: that the man release the former place and stand as more than the state that can no longer contain him.