The metaphor “life is a journey” endures as a timeless convention, drawing its vitality from humanity’s primal experiences of space and time. Since the dawn of consciousness, people have walked, migrated, and ventured across landscapes, framing their existence in terms of movement: quests, voyages, pilgrimages, exiles, wanderings, homecomings, and sojourns. These motifs reflect not only physical travel but also the existential arc of human life, a narrative of departure, transformation, and the ceaseless pursuit of meaning.
Pilgrimage (2018) is a profound allegory for the individual’s search for the sacred or the Self. It is a journey that begins with a rupture, a deliberate detachment from the familiar rhythms of daily life, which propels the pilgrim into a state of ambiguity. Stripped of conventional social roles, the pilgrim assumes an “outsider” status, suspended in a liminal space where identity dissolves and transformation becomes possible. In this threshold, the blurred boundaries between past and future, Self and other are navigated, grounding the journey as much in introspection as in physical progress.
Yet, unlike structured religious traditions that often culminate in a sacred destination or divine revelation, the metaphorical journey of life lacks a fixed endpoint. Instead, it unfolds as a dual motion: an outward traversal of the world’s vastness and an inward descent into the depths of the psyche. The pilgrim oscillates between motion and stillness, belonging and exile, discovery and loss. In this eternal intermesh, the journey itself becomes the destination, a paradox that mirrors life’s unanswerable questions and its relentless, open-ended becoming.
Poetry by: Kaleo Sansa
Adeola Olagunju © 2018
