I’m navigationally challenged.
I get lost. A lot. But I am a reliable compass. If I say with all sincerity to take a right at the next stop light, my son tells me he is absolutely sure he should go left. It works every time. Clearly, I have frequently saved him from ending up sunk in the Seventeenth Street Canal.
I theorize that I was born without a navigation gene, often referred to as the Magellan sense. Furthermore, I believe it is a gender linked component. I know this because 90% of woman get lost and 10% of those women are still circling the globe. It is possible that this orientation phenomenon is a result of the female’s exquisite sensitivity to the magnetic poles shifting. Just a thought.
At this moment, I visualize the smirk exchanged among the male gender as they spread their hands in a “that’s news?” gesture.
Women however are empathetically reliving the top 10 times they found themselves trying to back out of a dead end at night fall with eerie animal whispers and snapping twigs distracting their concentration.
Pre-GPS, directions were based on the location of gas stations, the picture show or the local post office. Everyone knew how to find those familiar land-marks. They weren’t relocated or replaced by parking lots overnight. They rarely got repainted.
Today, every journey seems to begin with an USB port, a password to enter the cryptic world of GPS. Here you will find both nervana (a new class of hardware, software, and cloud products built for artificial intelligence) and nirvana (the final beatitude that transcends suffering, karma, and samsara.) This whimsical pairing of retro and technology addiction is symbolized by an assertive but poised, disembodied voice that lures you out of the driveway into heavy traffic, through tunnels, across intersections and around hairpin turns, finally announcing happily that in 4 meters you will arrive at Grandma’s house on the right. Occasionally.
The directions with which I am more familiar are “Make a U turn at the next block.” That can result in a minimum of 3 or more U turns ending in a desperate maneuver onto a busy boulevard that looks like it could lead to an Interstate on-ramp in the same city I began.
At such times, debased by Miss Smarty-Pants’ unrelenting taunts, I pull the plug. Fear fills the quiet as I worry that sooner or later I will take a wrong turn into a wormhole that will deposit me on Europa, one of the 63 moons of Jupiter, during rush-eon traffic. I hope they are nice to immigrants.
My family, encouraged by my Granddaughters, gave me a Garmin GPS for Christmas. I attribute that wise decision to the time they found themselves in the back seat of the car when my daughter-in-law and I drove around a traffic cone straight into freshly poured cement. The sight of 4 workers waving hoes and shovels sprinting toward us shouting indecipherable Spanish words is traumatically etched into their memory. Sorry girls.
There is, however, a lot to be said for losing your way. Sometimes you have just found a new path in more peaceful surroundings traveled by new souls you have yet to meet. You may cross a bridge and stumble onto a road under construction that stirs your imagination, teases your sense of adventure and inspires visions of the destinations and resolve of those who will pass this way. Perhaps you will do like the characters in the tragicomedy by Tom Stoppard, Rosencratz and Guildenstern Are Dead “We cross our bridges as we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and the presumption that once our eyes watered.” I hope not.
It is possible that you will blunder onto a road strewn with rocks and branches that cause you to stumble and fall. Don’t assume you have taken the wrong path and turn back. Something grand may be just around the next pothole. It really isn’t the where of a journey as much as it is the how and the why.
Whatever your journey’s intentions, take it all in and keep moving forward. Your speed doesn’t matter. Experience what life is laying out before you and find in it something to value. Whatever you find, make the most of it.
The measure of a successful journey is that you do not return as the same person. At each journey’s end, a new opportunity to make a new ending surely awaits. Each of us have traveled paths others have yet to walk. I know I didn’t come this far only to have come this far. There are so many miracles yet to marvel.
There is one sure and steady direction I can always count on to guide me safely home that you might try. Follow the Star that stood over Bethlehem.
If you should see me on the highways and byways, say hello and throw out a stream of bread crumbs. Keep going… it will all make sense soon.
A funny for the New Year:
I think Santa has riverfront property in Brazil. All our presents came from Amazon this year.