The Road Not Taken

Recently, my boyfriend and I visited upstate NY for a day trip. We left about 8AM in the morning and didn’t hit the road for the return trip home until around 10:30 PM that night.  Around midnight, we were just approaching the tri-boro bridge, which would have meant we were only about another 30-45 minutes away from home. The drive up and back until that point was thankfully drama free but right then, just as we started to approach the bridge, traffic started backing up BADLY and suddenly a police car, fire truck and an ambulance cut through the barrage of cars that were piling up quickly and made their way towards what was causing the back up ahead. We knew it had to be a pretty bad accident. Of course, we felt bad for whoever was involved in the accident but we also felt bad for us, because the police were redirecting everyone in that lane…the lane we needed to be in to get home… to the far off right lane instead, causing us to take an unexpected turn and causing us to get totally lost.

With no access to the internet (I’m lucky I have a cell phone these days, never mind internet service on it) no map (when you only take the subway into Manhattan you usually don’t keep a road map to drive there very handy) and no one that I would want to bother at midnight on a Saturday night just so I could ask some directions…we were in some serious trouble. With no where for us to pull off to the side of the road and try figure things out, we just had to keep driving, and get further and further lost. I started to get really scared and then started to pray. Thankfully it wasn’t too much longer before I recognized a familiar exit we were starting to approach… the Battery Tunnel….but before we reached it, we came across some policemen who had pulled someone over (I think it was a drunk driver) and asked them for directions. With their help and directions, we finally arrived home safely…after 2:00 in the morning! We were tired, stressed and weary, but thankfully we were now HOME!

I like to believe that life throws lessons at us when it feels we need to learn something and I felt that this was, indeed, one of those moments. Like I always say, if I have to go through something crappy, I would like to at least try and take SOMETHING positive from the experience. I also like to learn quickly from the exceptionally crappy experiences so I don’t have to re-learn from them again at some point in the future. So with that said, here is what I learned from taking the road that should NOT have been taken.

When life throws us a curve, you can do several things with it.

1. Panic

2. Go “Woe is me”, have yourself a great big ol’ pity party, and just wallow in your “Boo-hoo’s” and “Why me’s.”

3. Just stay calm, go with the flow, ride the wave and see where you wind up.

The experience also showed me that just ONE wrong decision, choosing left instead of right, can throw you off course and off the path that you are meant to be on in the blink of an eye. If this happens, you have two choices. Realize what happened quickly and make every effort to recover from your error, make things right, and get back on the right path again. Or you can choose to do nothing, stay on the path you know is wrong, and wind up lost and unaware of where you are going for a very long time, taking you further and further away from where you belong.

Sometimes the road that is not taken can be just as important as the road that is. Sometimes the lessons of “what could have been” can stay with us and effect us even more than the results of “what actually was” can.  Remember, the next time you come upon a fork in the road of life, choose wisely, because you just might not realize what you could be losing by choosing the wrong path until it’s too late, and some paths you just can’t simply turn around on and return to what you left behind so easily.

The road not taken….not just a direction to travel in, but also a way of looking at life itself.

Copyright October 5, 2011

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