The Dead End Path

I've noticed a correlation between my children's ages and the decline of blog posts. The older they get, the less I post. There are book reports and baseball games and track practice. Life is on the go and the posting is sporadic.

But there's another thing. I'd been working on a series which, maybe some day I will post. I was hoping to get to post it soon but life happened. It's no longer relevant. So, for now, the series will remain in draft form, dear to my heart but not available to my seven loyal readers--and the one lurker who thinks she knows the details of Matthew's adoption and leaves hateful comments even though she doesn't have a clue. 

Sometimes we're faced with a choice. It's a life altering, really enormous, gigantic choice. And we're standing at a crossroads looking down each way, unsure of what to do. One way is straight and we can see the end and it looks fine. It's comfortable. It's what we've always known. The other way is the path less taken and we cannot see the end but there's a promise that it's great. There are risks, to be sure, but we are continuously told that it will all turn out wonderfully in the end. We trust the people on the hill because they tell us they've been there before and everything looks great up ahead. There is an emotional toll. There may even be a financial toll. Still, we choose that path. We take the step. We walk boldly in the direction we chose. Because we have to know what's up there...

Sometimes, that path was a dead end. Someone had removed the sign long ago and we thought we were headed somewhere amazing. When we get to the dead end, we're pretty livid at all the walking we did, pretty annoyed that we climbed a hill to nowhere only to discover that there isn't even a view from here, pretty devastated, wishing we hadn't paid such high tolls. We examine ourselves. We ask why we went that way when the other option would have been infinitely better. But we remind ourselves that we never had a map. It was anyone's best guess. And we know that if we had gone the other way, we would never have known what was up that windy, steep hill and we always would have wondered.

And so we are angry. And we are sad. Because life didn't work out the way we thought it would. But at least we weren't left wondering.

Some day I may talk more about this winding path. Until then, wait on me. There's no need to ask others as this was, more or less, a personal and secret journey and others do not know.

See each choice you make is a kind of a loss

Each turn that you take

and each coin that you toss

You lose all the choices

you don't get to make

You wonder about 

all the turns you don't take

-If/Then