“If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there.” – Lewis Carroll
There is a point in every journey when you stop, even just for a moment, and wonder where you are going. Perhaps you sit for awhile and have a cold glass of iced tea. Bend over to tie your shoe or look out onto a field of yellow mustard dancing in the breeze. You scratch your head and make a mental note to yourself to remember to pick up some milk on the way home or go to the bank or stop by the post office to see if the car registration has come.
You might look back over your shoulder and see where you have been. The familiar road fades off into the distance. Your mind is filled with faces and experiences and other benches you sat on along the way, if only briefly.
There are people who are ahead of you, of course. Hikers who arrive at the trailhead just as the sun is coming up, a peanut butter sandwich and granola bar, water and a few boxes of raisins tucked in their daypack. They are prepared. They are ready for what is to come.
And then there are those of us who just start walking. We probably didn’t remember the granola bars or the raisins and there just wasn’t any bread to make the peanut butter sandwich although we did think about it ever so briefly. If we’re lucky, we have on a good pair of shoes, some water and a sweatshirt, just in case it gets cold. And then again, maybe not.
I’m that kind of hiker.
I think it was somewhere around “M” when Frank started leaving me a little note or two. “I can’t wait to see how you are going to handle X,” he wrote with clearly a smile on his face. He knew it was coming.
I have to confess. I hadn’t thought about it. At least, not until I got to “W”.
That’s just the way I do things.
On Saturday afternoon, one of my clever social work students brought in a handful of postcards. Flipping them upside down so that we could not see the picture on the front, she invited us to choose one. Once everyone had chosen, we were to look at the image on the front and talk about our work and the connection to the postcard we had chosen.
I got this one.
On Sunday evening, I had yet another battle with my 17 year old. I’m not sure when I unwittingly wandered into enemy territory, but lately I’ve been finding myself there an awful lot with little to no ammunition and no knowledge of how to get out. This battle centered around the stuff he has on his iPod.
Music, he calls it.
I call it crap. Offensive crap.
“Remember when we were kids,” I reminisced with the principal as we were driving home. “And Paul Simon had that song ‘Kodachrome’?” We would turn up the radio and sing along at the top of our lungs, “When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school.”
Yup. We said it. Crap. So risqué. So daring. So over the top.
Yeah right.
“Do you know what those words mean?” I chastised as we were walking into Applebee’s for the post-church bribe. And with that, we were off and running. I could feel the heat begin to rise as my face took on a familiar red hue.
“It doesn’t really mean that,” he said as I proceeded to recount the definition of the lyrics that moments ago were booming out of his headphones. He rolled his eyes and gave me that all too familiar “You so don’t have a clue” look.
Huh?
“They’re just words. You don’t really listen to this music for the words.”
I would hope not.
There are moments on this journey that I really have no idea where I am going.
That’s what I thought about as I flipped over that postcard. It’s all about remembering that this is where I am right now. I wasn’t here before and I won’t be here forever. Sometimes being here isn’t the easiest place to be in the universe, but it is where I am. At least for now.
I may not know where I am going, but I know one thing. I just have to keep putting one foot in front of the other.
Because if I do, I’m bound to get there, eventually.