Heeding Direction

I have always prided myself on having a good sense of direction. My mother tells me that I get that from the Street side of the family. My grandfather, David, had an internal compass that rarely steered him wrong.

The truth is, I don't always know exactly where I am, but I can usually find my way from point A to point B and beyond with a fair degree of confidence that I will end up where I hoped to be. Most of the time, I feel superior to the road map.

A few years ago, I came back into NYC through the Holland Tunnel rather late in the evening. From there it was just a hop skip and a jump over the river and through the hoods to Brooklyn where I was staying. It didn't concern me that I went over the Manhattan Bridge rather than the Williamsburg Bridge. To my logical mind, it seemed like I should be able to cut to the left until I reconnected. I thought it might even be a clever shortcut.

This sense of optimism stayed with me as I traveled deeper into the urban midnight. A left turn. A right turn. A pause to let nightclub revelers drunken with the fever of "closing time" cross in front of me. Onward.

It wasn't until I realized that I was the only one on the road who wasn't driving a tricked out Cadillac, that I began to feel uneasy. My heart began to thud in answer to the bass boom of the supersonic stereo systems competing around me. I jumped with each flash of golden hubcap that caught across my windshield. I didn't need a road sign to tell me that I, and my rented white Oldsmobile with Massachusetts plates, needed to turn around. Immediately.

I zig-zagged back through the neighborhoods, back over the river, and back to connect with the Williamsburg Bridge as I should have done in the first place. My well-intentioned "shortcut" took 2.5 hours to correct.

Even more years ago, when I was still living in New Hampshire, I ventured one day from the cozy nest where I lived at the foot of Mount Monadnock to the big city of Manchester for some shopping. I can't remember what I needed or why I went, but any day that I left the mountainside was special.

Maybe I was giddy with the sense of independence that came from being on the roam. Maybe it was simply a moment of inattention, but when I arrived at the junction of several highways, I missed a road sign and ended up heading north on the Everett Turnpike. A toll road. And, I needed to be going south.

Now, that might not seem like a big deal to most people, but at that point in my life when money was scarce, the dollar I paid to go the wrong direction, and the dollar that I paid to turn around seemed a bitter price. I hadn't watched for the signs, and it cost me.

I remember at the time thinking that there was a lesson to be learned. What really is the price of taking the wrong road?

Sometimes we think we know a quicker way, and we end up where we don't belong. In relationships that should never be. And, far from where we know we are safe. We pay a toll for the privilege of traveling the wrong road, and we pay again when we want to turn around and say we made a mistake. Sometimes, if we are lucky, we can get back to where we started without any real harm. We are wiser for the journey although we have wasted enormous amounts of time and energy. Other times, we are not so lucky and end up bruised in a corner choking on the taste of our own blood.

In life a great sense of direction is not always enough. A map exists because someone has already been there. Done that. The tollgates, the bridges to nowhere, the one-way streets, and the dead ends have been clearly marked. The question is, will we read that map and heed direction, or will we head off on our own to pay the price again and again?