The Roads You Take In Life

We have a wooden sign hanging up over the door in the breezeway leading from our house to the garage that says:

‘”Of all the roads you take in life,

Make sure a few of them are dirt.”

How true, how true. Taking the well-trod way, the paved road, the superhighway marked clearly on the map of life, certainly looks at first glance (or even at the fifteenth “close look” sometimes) like the fastest and best way to get from point A to point B. But it’s sometimes worth thinking about what you’re not experiencing in choosing to take the easy way rather than Robert Frost’s “path less traveled”.

On our long-distance walks, Joan & I are usually on one of those less traveled paths. Some, like in Spain on the Camino de Santiago being less traveled for some 2,000 years since they were built by the Romans as a superhighway of its time but have long since fallen into disrepair and ankle-turning decay. Most of the time we are walking on forest trails or pathways worn into the meadows by thousands of wayfarer’s boots before us over the years. Many more, like in the Cotswolds last year, are shared with the current occupants, flocks of grazing sheep or cows. While we often chat while we walk, most of the time is filled with our own thoughts or taking stock of our bodies, as fleeting pains and twitches echo magically within our bodies as they move from big toe to hip to a new twinge in an artificial knee. And since Joan and I have five artificial leg joints between us (two knees for Joan; two ankles and a knee for Sam), this happens a lot!

But most of the time on our walks it’s easy to be lulled into a sense of oneness with the world we’re part of on our walks. Some days that world is filled to the brim with the beauty and vitality of nature. If you’re quiet and mindful, wonder often happens. Look! – its the soft green curlicues of emerging fiddlehead ferns pushing up in the early spring, almost asking to be picked to join you for supper that night. Or a fishing great blue heron way over there by the river, carefully ignoring you as you walk closer but finally taking flight once we get inside their safety zone. Maybe it’s the skittering of a chipmunk across the path just ahead of you –zip, he’s gone.

Other times it just feels so GOOD as I walk into the tunnel of green overarching branches, stretching away towards infinity it seems, that it makes me break out in song. Not always a pleasing contribution to the music of the spheres, but a rousing verse or three of “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” or “I’m Looking Over A Four Leaf Clover” just sometimes has to be heard.

Preferably though, just not heard by other people. No point in ruining their day!