Monday, May 24: road trip
“And what I think we all need more than anything is this: permission to be wherever the fuck we are when we’re there.”
I’m a day behind.
No matter how I course correct or try to go faster, I will never catch up. I read a New Yorker cartoon years ago that showed a woman walking quickly from her running car back into her house. The caption read something like, “Gladys had to turn around because she forgot her purse. She spent the rest of her life thinking she was 10 minutes behind.”
Yesterday, as we were driving back from Minneapolis, I needed to merge right to make an exit. There was a red car sitting in my blind spot that insisted on keeping pace with me even though I was speeding up and had my signal on. I cut him off and he honked at me, but I still didn’t make the exit. Instead, I traveled two miles farther down I-35 to the next exit where I turned around and got back on the interstate.
My sister says when things like that happen—forgetting your purse or missing an exit—it’s God taking you out of harm’s way and onto a better path. I tend to agree. Sort of. But then I think about Saturday’s turtle and the multitude of actions that led him to converge with a car. A small delay could have put him between the wheels rather than under them. Or perhaps it was that stop for just one more tasty bug that proved, eventually, fatal.
We can’t know and trying to figure out if the turtle was on or off schedule will only drive you, me, and Gladys crazy.
There is only one schedule and it is the one we are on. We are always where we need to be. That doesn’t mean it’s always good. And it doesn’t mean we always want to be there—but we need to be there. Or at least, we have to allow ourselves to be there.
I have five blank pages in my journal representing a long weekend lost to travel and family. I’m tempted to go back to those pages and write on them or re-date the days and start my week over—stickering over last Thursday and making it today—but then I would be forever behind, trying to fill in holes of the past with scoops of the future.
I will leave my journal pages intentionally blank and start my week on Tuesday by posting a blog for Monday because Wednesday is my birthday—the day the calendar starts over or again.
