Life is a Highway

I was on my home from the city the other day after a string of meetings. I was tired and looking forward to getting home however I wasn’t looking forward to the 100km drive that stood between me and my destination of home.
There was a lot of construction going on everywhere it seemed and my last clients of the day suggested I take a road that runs parallel to the highway I needed to be on. I would take it to the end and then get back onto the highway saving myself a twenty minute wait in construction. It had been a few years since I took this route but it seemed like a reasonable plan.
As I approached the end of the road, I quickly noticed that a lot of changes had occurred. There were exits and off ramps where a simple stop sign used to be. I entered into what looked like a maze of roadway and veered onto an exit ramp when I saw a sign directing me “West.”
As I made my way around this large curve in the road, I drove past a sign that read “West/ Toronto” and quickly realized I had just exited onto the wrong highway. This used to be the highway I drove when  we were living in our first home together in the town where Meredith was born. It was no longer a two lane highway with multiple crossings of rural roads. Now it was a four lane, divided highway and I was going in the wrong direction.

For a second, I didn’t know where I was and it took me a moment to get my bearings. When I realized that I was on a completely different highway than I was supposed to be on, my initial reaction was to find the closest exit to get back to where I was just a moment ago and where I wanted to be.
Well, this new highway doesn’t allow for exits. It quickly became clear that I was committed to taking the long way home. It meant that I had to drive further away in order to eventually get to my intended destination. I laughed at myself as I drove along. I was exhausted but I immediately let my frustration go and just decided to enjoy the ride because what were my options? I know for certain that ten years ago, I might have slammed my fist onto the steering wheel in anger and carried this disdain at my stupidity all the way home. But, there was no turning back and besides, although a longer drive, I knew that the scenery was far more enjoyable on this detour.
Life is like that. We have expectations, a lot of them, and we approach our lives confined by these expectations of how we think and believe things should unfold. By doing so, we live under the guise of control. If we have certain expectations, then we have some sense of control and this makes us feel less anxious. But this perceived sense of control is an illusion.
All it takes is one gigantic unexpected detour in life to force you to see that having expectations and controlling outcomes leads to disaster because that is not how life unfolds. Whether or not you want to believe that, is up to you but I can say with conviction that dropping expectations and adapting to the unfolding of life however it reveals itself, will set you free. What you do control is how you will respond. Will you spend the entire time looking for an exit or a way back to where you used to be, to your comfort zone? Or will you see where you used to be in your rear view mirror and move forward choosing to enjoy the scenery along the way?