Do you ever take the time to pause during your week, month, or year?
Do you reflect on your life as it is now? Does it match the vision you had for it a few years ago? Are you staying on course? I wonder how many of us have veered off course along the way to take a different path than the one we originally planned.
How many of us ever expected to go through a divorce? How many others thought they’d go back to school? How many thought they’d have just one child? Is it impossible to chart our course and stick to it? When I finished high school, I had a clear vision of what my adult life would be like. I saw myself buying a house fairly young and starting a family. In the end, I graduated from college at 27, and I still don’t have any children, even though I’m 31.
I’d like to know which of you have managed to follow your own path. Maybe some detours lead us to something better. On the other hand, some lead us to a dead end—or worse, to a ravine where the drop is steep. The road is unpredictable. I tell myself that’s why we need to take the time to stop—but above all, to take the time to live. We need to make the most of the scenery and the moments along our journey. Our lives race by at a frantic pace, and we sometimes feel like slowing down is impossible. Yet we must take the time to do so before we find ourselves in that ravine.
We don’t know when we’ll reach the end of our journey, but one thing is certain: we’ll continue to travel down unknown paths. We’ll pick up more people along the way and leave others behind somewhere along the route.
What if the paths we’ve taken over the years were impossible to avoid? What if we simply had to follow the paths life leads us down, since we can’t follow a predetermined route? It’s precisely these unexpected paths that make our lives beautiful and complete.