When planning a vacation, you can decide where you want to go and then find the best way to get there. Of course, you may want to get places to stay reserved for the trip. This sometimes makes the trip easier on the nerves.
Or you can one day decide to go on vacation and just drive. When you see something you want to investigate, you can stop and visit. When you get tired, you can find a place to stay. When hungry, you stop and eat. All off the cuff and unplanned. But what happens when there is no place to stay, or anywhere to eat. The whole trip can be easy, but a bit of nervousness when you need a place to stay.
It is much easier today to ‘plan’ that second style of vacation. With cell phones, computers and GPS units you can make hotel reservations for the end of the day and take off in the direction of your hotel. You can still make unscheduled stops, following a general direction.
But what about a journey where you don’t know exactly where you are going? You don’t know how you will get there. You do not know the path you need to take. You don’t know if you will have a place to rest for the night, or even enough food for the day. Would you want to take that journey?
What would you say if I said you were already on that journey? If you are among the living, you are taking that journey. No matter how well you think your life is mapped out, the path you will take, and the outcome of that journey is all up in the air.
Think back 5, 10 or 15 years. I remember in interviews always being asked where do you expect to be in 5 years. As far as I remember any of the answers, I am not, and never have been where I thought I would be. My priorities changed, life intervened, things happened. Are you where you thought you would be? Is the path you took, the one you had planned?
Where do I want to be in 5 years? What do I want to do in 10? I honestly don’t know. I am taking what life gives me right now. I work, I have fun and sometimes I relax. Plans we make can fall by the wayside very quickly. I don’t know my path, but I will make it my own. Will there be a place to stay at the end of the day? I certainly hope so. If not, I plan to be resourceful enough to make my own place.
I want to be with my husband, raising our son, still close to our families. Other than that, I don’t care where I am in 5, 10, 15 years. But B and I are also the people who will plan to go on a day trip to a Ren Faire, get there, decide it doesn’t really look like a good fair, decide to check out a pick-your-own farm we saw signs for on the way to the Faire, get lost on the way there, find out it’s closed when we do get there, get lost on the way back, pick up fruit at a Mom-and-Pop stand by the side of the road, stop for dinner in a tiny little country cemetery, switch drivers three times on the way home, fall into bed at 1:00 am, and think we had a great day. Weirdos, huh? 🙂
And then things change. Your first sentence sums up exactly what I wanted (replace daughters for son and wife for husband). Didn’t exactly turn out that way. Like I said things change very quickly.