The Paths that Lead us…

The Paths that Lead us…

I recently went on a Road trip to a family event with my brother and his partner. From where I live to the destination should have been a 6 – 7 hour drive max, but turned out into a 13 hour trip. The trip itself was not smooth-sailing – not at all. It was long, arduous, challenging and oftentimes alarming, with moments coming up within me wondering if we shouldn’t just turn back and go home…

Here’s the story of how I assisted and supported myself to deal with this unexpected experience which (eventually) turned out to be quite a fruitful adventure.

We left in the morning around 08:30 am, estimating to arrive at our destination around 16:00 pm that same day – yet, by 16:00 pm we had not even managed to reach halfway. We’ve been on the road for a good 7 hours and the paths we took lead us in all sorts of other directions, except for the direction towards our destination. Here is a brief breakdown of what happened – mostly due to errors on our part…

About an hour’s worth of driving before reaching the halfway mark of our road trip – an accident occurred on the highway right in front of the town that was to be our halfway stop and so no cars had access to reach this town via the highway.  The traffic officers were sending everyone through an alternate route, which in itself added almost another 2 hours to the trip. With this, the three of us decided to use GPS to see if we can find another shorter alternate route to get back onto the highway and drive the more direct route to our destination, hoping that the GPS would place us back onto the highway in a position where we’d miss the accident; essentially finding a way around the accident, back onto the highway instead of driving an entire alternate route. This did not work out.

We ended up getting back onto the highway, but right behind the accident and so we parked the car on the highway and decided to wait it out…but after 2 hours of waiting and gathering information from the traffic / accident departments we realised we didn’t know how long we’d have to wait and so decided to turn back and drive the initial alternate route. Yet, driving back to the initial alternate route as the traffic officers directed would have also taken a lot of time and so we decided to consult the GPS once more to see if we can find a shorter route back to the alternate route than the roads we initially took…This did not work out. The GPS malfunctioned in rural / farm areas where we’d been driving, taking us into long, bendy, thin, barely drivable roads until there was a moment the GPS said to turn right and there was no right!!! This lead us to once again turn around – lay the GPS to rest, let go of wanting to make up for time and find shorter routes and return to the paths we know will lead us to the destination.

All of the above took us from about 08:30 in the morning until 15:00 – 16:00 in the afternoon, still not having reached our halfway mark! Because, when we eventually reached the initial alternate route – the alternate route had roads that haven’t been worked on for over 5 years…the roads were in a dire state of decay with so many holes / falling apart that all the cars / trucks from the highway were backed up bumper-to-bumper and weaving through these roads trying to find space to actually drive on…This in itself delayed us for almost 2 hours until we eventually between 17:00 – 18:00 reached the town as the halfway mark and from there it was smooth sailing except for minor delays where they were still working on the roads with only one lane available and had to wait between 15 – 20 minutes for cars from one direction to pass before cars from our direction could pass.

So, with all the accidents, taking shortcuts ending up delaying us even more, the condition of roads, traffic, wrong turns etc. – we eventually after 13 hours reached our destination! In the beginning, when we’d already been on the road for 7 hours with not reaching even our halfway mark I suggested we turn around and go home – but then again, what came up in me was “we’ve been through all of this, let’s push forward” and I’m grateful we did, because the weekend with family opened up / inspired many realisations in the relationship with myself and others for which I am grateful. So, the entire journey – through all the ups and downs was definitely worth it in the end…

One of the first realisations I was looking at as we were driving was how much of life generally tends to be this way – many mistakes, wrong turns, falling, going into a certain direction only leading to nowhere and having to stop / change course, failing etc.; yet within this I’d say we don’t tend to enough focus on ourselves and what we can learn from this journey, this experience that is our lives. Where we more tend to focus on the things going wrong / bad or shall I rather say the things not going according to how we expect / initially plan them to – instead of focusing on who we are within and during this journey, this experience that is our lives. Because, during the initial first 7 hours – there was a moment where I embraced even the possibility that things could get worse, I played out the worst possible scenarios of what could have happened and had to be okay with it, knowing that whatever will come, I have me, I have my process, my self honesty and there’s much still on a personal level for me to face, to realise about me and life in general…so, I essentially had to accept the fact that we can never know where the paths in our lives will lead us, to not prejudge it, to not expect / anticipate or try and predetermine a certain path / journey – but maintain focus on who I am in every moment and what I am going to learn about me, my process and my life within whatever comes.

So, in the next post – I’ll continue with “the paths that lead us” – how from one perspective, we’ll take paths in our lives that’ll lead us into a particular direction, but at the same time, you can lead yourself through that path based on who you are and how you approach it…