Who what where how, let’s just be.
I am a traveler. I am a car on a road.
Following that GPS that no one agrees on who’s configured it.
I am the car AND the road. The beginning of the road is who I used to be and who I am. The end of the road is who I shall be and who I am.
One day this car went out of the path planned by the GPS. Losing its track.
It felt like a mistep, even maybe a mistake; a swerve you couldn’t take back.
In this lost place, we may have felt frustrated, disappointed, even scared sometimes. In this lost place you felt loss, sadness and regret for getting off the track.
Then we found the beaten track. You cried in relief.
You stepped on it and drove. As fast as you could, so as to catch back time.
But then you realized; it wasn’t your road. It wasn’t the road you had lost long ago. And you didn’t like this new one. You couldn’t live on that one. And as you were starting to run short of fuel, you realized a second thing; you wouldn’t want to drive on any road that wasn’t yours.
So you made a choice. You made the choice to leave the beaten track and go back on that route you had felt alone on.
You turned the freaking wheel and you said no more!
Doesn’t matter the hair pin bends, doesn’t matter the swaying bridges, doesn’t matter the hours long of jams and the gridlocks. Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter as long as I get home.
So you sat through the frustration, the disappointments, the sadness and the fear.
You sat for hours; it felt like eternity.
You wondered, wondered on the routes. Finding out that some of them had actual beauty. A beauty you had yet not seen, such as the route that appeared, you had not seen with the speed. The route you had been looking for for so long.
Here is; we weren’t ever lost; just on another route registered in the GPS.
Another route that wasn’t yours. Another route that became your itinerary, a part of your road.
You were never lost, because the GPS knows all the ways.
You were never wrong either. You were never wrong because it’s thanks to the detour that you saw beauty.
I am thankful for the wonder. For stopping in the middle of the road. For this walk on a poppy field amidst horses, when the sun sets and fog is still visible.
This is your road it is perfect.
This itinerary you took may have made you intrude somebody else’s route.
And maybe you’re not sorry for that.
Reflecting back on it now, you see that it was actually just a break, not a nice ‘pee and snacks’ break, but a necessitated break.
Just a pause to rest and replenish before getting back.
Getting back on that road, that is your life.
Getting back on that road, that makes you.
Yours,
~ Aline Charles
