Robert Frost once said, “I took the road least traveled by, and it has made all the difference.” And I have to say, he was smack on the money. I did take the road least traveled by, and it HAS made all the difference, because I now know that I am hopelessly lost.
This is not a new condition for me. My sense of direction is abysmal. If left to my own devices, even attempting to follow the sun or keep specific landmarks in sight, I inevitably end up about as far away from my destination as it is possible to get, agitated, frustrated, and angry as hell at myself for not having used my GPS. The only exception to this rule, are places that I have driven routinely for at least six months.
For years this was a standing joke in my family. My dad never fails to remind me of the time I came to visit him and his third wife for the summer when they lived in Calais, Maine, a town right on the Canadian border. I was about 9 years old, and was big into bike riding. I had a pumpkin orange Schwinn, 3 speed cruiser and was very proud of the fact that I was mobile and could pretty much go anywhere I wanted. Anyway, this one time I was out, riding up and down the backroads around the town, when I came to a guard post. It was a back road, dirt, and I was confused because I was headed back to the house and there hadn’t been anything like that on my way out. When I reached the post the guards (there were two of them, each in a different uniform) came out and asked me where I was going. I told them, and learned to my chagrin, that sometime during my back road bike ride I had crossed over the Canadian border and was now coming BACK into the United Sates. The guards were good natured about it, called my dad to verify that I belonged there, and sent me on my way. But the thought that I could be somewhere completely different without realizing it always stuck in my head.
It didn’t get any better as I got older. As a 12-year-old I got lost on a mountain I had hiked at least 8 times before. Somehow, I got separated from my friends, got off the trail and ended up not just on a different path, but at the top of a completely different mountain. As a college student on holiday in Australia, I got lost in downtown Sydney. I was supposed to meet my group at the Opera House, but ended up on the piers instead. At least that time the end result were clear directions from a shopkeeper and an excellent basket of fish and chips.
As a young adult traveling through Europe, and long before there was such a thing as GPS available, I got lost in London (though I found a very interesting hidden garden behind a block of row houses and had a long conversation with some very cool punk rock musicians).
In Helsinki I ended up at the fish market instead of the mall, but had no regrets as the market was full of cats looking for their lunch, and, being a cat person, I spent the whole day just hanging out with them and taking pictures.
In Stockholm I couldn’t find my bus station, so I stopped at a café for directions and ended up spending several enjoyable hours conversing with a Lebanese gentleman who bought me breakfast, then helped me with my luggage to the depot.
In Amsterdam I ended up in the red-light district at 2 am, which was an instant education, though being up all night got me some amazing photos of dawn over the canals.
Even now, just driving regular streets and highways gets me turned around sometimes, and I have found myself wandering through Boston’s narrow and winding roads or New York’s continual gridlock or (god help me) Washington DC with all its one way streets, trying to figure a way out and starting to get frantic that I would run out of gas before I figured out where I was and how to get home.
This, of course, resulted in comments from my family, such as “Don’t let mom drive, we’ll end up in New Jersey” or “What happened Steph, you get confused on the Rotary again? I’ve always taken the ribbing fairly good naturedly, and have done my best to always set my GPS instructions -AND FOLLOW THEM – no matter what.
Of course, GPS is not always reliable, as the one day that I was taking my youngest daughter to a party at a friend’s house and, in following the GPS, ended up following a very faint track across the middle of an honest to goodness field. Mind you, the track DID, eventually, take me to her friend’s house, but by a weird circuitous route that that brought me up behind the house, literally on the edge of their trimmed and well-kept back yard.
I found out later that the track through the field was an ATV track, and that my GPS (at the time it was a separate, boxy thing, a Garmin, that I had to attach to my windshield and hope to heck that it didn’t fall into my lap if I went over a pothole. This older model did not automatically update, so it didn’t always recognize new roads or neighborhoods and had issues when roads merged or changed. I couldn’t afford the update to the system, so I had to make do with what I had. By using it I would usually end up close enough to where I wanted to go that I was able to figure out how to complete my trip.
It wasn’t until my own daughters were teenagers and began “finding their own way” as young women, that I came to realize that being a chronic directionally challenged person wasn’t just a matter of getting lost physically, it was an indicator of something much deeper than that.
You see, once upon a time, I NEVER got lost. As a small child, I always knew exactly where I was, physically, mentally, and emotionally. I knew which direction home was. I knew who I was. I knew what I wanted in life. I knew what made me happy. I had no compunction about doing what I needed to do to achieve my dreams. I just went out and DID it.
Somewhere along the way I stopped being the real Steph, the one who knew exactly what she wanted and what she needed to do to get there. Somewhere along the way I got good and lost. Not only did it take decades to realize that I WAS lost, but to realize that somewhere along the way I had misplaced my authentic self.
There is no one person to blame. Call it a combination of parenting, family expectations, religious upbringing, religious education, marriage choices and societal expectations, but I began second guessing myself and questioning the dreams themselves as well as my personal ability to achieve them.
And so, I stumbled through half of my life having no idea where I was or where I was wanting to go. It resulted in a life lived not by intention, but in reaction to things that happened TO me. And just as I physically found it difficult to ask for help in asking for directions in an unfamiliar city or backwoods burg, I found it next to impossible to admit that I was also mentally and emotionally lost, let alone ask for help in finding my way.
It has truly been an experience to come to a point in my life where I am able to admit that I was lost; to routinely enter AND USE my GPS, and to start working through the reasons behind why I never had a plan for my life; why I never knew what I wanted to do when I grew up.
Part of that has involved going back in memory to my childhood and reliving those times when I was so sure, so focused on what I wanted to do that it consumed every particle of my being. Of exploring those moments when I had gotten so completely lost physically and how I had been feeling mentally and emotionally before I took “the road less traveled.” It also included examining the experiences that getting physically lost had resulted in, and what there was to learn from them. Of course, it has also been a treasure trove of memories that make for excellent story material, which as a writer, I have found invaluable.
Come to think of it, maybe there was a method to my madness. Perhaps my subconscious knew that the only way that I could truly connect with others was if I had to first lose and then reconnect with myself.
Perhaps taking the road less traveled has not been a mistake after all.
-JustSteph
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