“Alice came to a fork in the road. ‘Which road do I take?’ she asked.
‘Where do you want to go?’ responded the Cheshire Cat.
‘I don’t know,’ Alice answered.
‘Then,’ said the Cat, ‘it doesn’t matter.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Many years ago, when I was young and thought I knew just about everything, I believed that all major decisions to map out your life had to be made early in life, and that they all had to be right, the first time around, because the rest of your life would be based on those choices. That you had to plan all the steps along the way so that you would get to your proper destination. But as the years and decades flew by, I discovered neither of those things stood up to reality, and that the destination is not the point of it all. Now I appreciate how much freedom we do have with all the choices that come rolling along towards us, some with the seeming impact of boulders bouncing down a mountain side, and sometimes I face them with shaky legs and a heart that screams “Enough!” But once the dust clears, it’s all ok again. Lessons learned. They really are a gift, a chance to reinvent ourselves – the spices that liven up our days. They offer us a continual choice – do we want to stretch out in new directions, or not?
“Only in growth, reform, and change,
Paradoxically enough,
Is true security to be found.”
– Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Photograph © Janice Henshaw 2015